#i know its easy to forget that in season 2 when the writers keep playing into the whole 'bumbling lovable idiot husband' schtick for laughs

[biblicalhorror]

Girl help they're calling the guy who blackmailed his wife and her teammates over their trauma to save his furniture store a "himbo who just loves his wife and wants her to be happy"

[the-ferocious-kittyrose]

Rewriting Haggar/Honerva’s redemption arc

One of the many things that bothered me about VLD S8 is Honerva’s redemption arc. While I was never fully against the idea of Honerva getting a redemption arc, I just didn’t want VLD to do it because I knew that they would fuck it up if they tried. And low and behold, I was right!

But yeah, I wasn’t against the idea of her being redeemed. And I don’t mean “redeemed” as in “all is forgiven and she’s just a good guy now,” but more like a Darth Vader, “the things she did were inexcusable and she would never be able to right all her wrongs but she goes out on one good act to show that there was still good in her deep down and she at least had the potential to change.”

I know a lot of people don’t like the whole, “redemption=death” thing, which I understand, but I personally never had a problem with it.

Ok, so why didn’t Honerva’s redemption work? Well there are a few reasons but the one that baffles me the most is that, instead of trying to make her more sympathetic, season 8 seemed to go out of its way to show her being more evil and vile than ever.

And because I have nothing better to do, I’m gonna go through Honerva’s story in VLD and explain what I would change to make her redemption more believable.

(Keep in mind I am not a writer, this is just me ranting about my favorite character and how I personally would’ve written her.)

1. Realizing she’s Altean

I always thought it’s was weird that when Allura said “you’re...Altean!?” In the S2 finale, Haggar didn’t seem to react at all, she just kept attacking. It’s as if she didn’t care or already knew, which doesn’t make sense considering in the S3 finale and S8E2 it’s established that Haggar has no memory of who she was before she died. And in S4E3 she seems shocked by her Altean face (which also doesn’t make sense because her blue skin isn’t camouflage that’s just how she looks after the rift) so it seems like she didn’t know.

Wouldn’t it have made more sence if after Allura said “you’re...Altean!?” Honerva looked confused/shocked? If she became defensive and said Allura was lying/trying to insult her? There’s def anti-Altean propaganda in the empire so it would be considered an insult.

After that she starts questioning Zarkon. And when she looks into his mind, it’s out of genuine curiosity and desire to know the truth, not because, “the empire needs him” or whatever that meant.

And isn’t it a bit odd that she doesn’t seem betrayed at all when she finds out Zarkon has been keeping all this from her? She’s just like, “oh, you’re my husband? Cool.” Wtf???

2. Her past relationship with Zarkon

Okay, I love Zonerva, but if we’re being honest, Zarkon was not the best husband. He enabled the shit out of Honerva, even when it was obvious that the rift was doing serious damage to her physical and mental health. To me, it seems like Zarkon was so blinded by the power the rift gave him that he didn’t realize/ignored the negative effect it was having on Honerva. In the same way he downplayed the negative impact the rift had on the planet.

I think that should’ve been explored more. Maybe Honerva notices that she’s been acting differently and is worried somethings wrong (think S5 Kuron). And Honerva tries to tell Zarkon that she feels strange and Zarkon just brushes it off.

And later, when Alfor visits Diaibazaal years later. Things are pretty much the same except when we sees Honerva, she is very obviously pregnant and Alfor’s there when Honerva falls and goes into labor (instead of a random quintessence seizure). Alfor and many Galran doctors try their best to save her and the baby but she dies in childbirth.

Zarkon goes ballistic. He’s yelling, throwing doctors across the room, and Alfor turns to the doctor holding Lotor and tells them to get the baby to safely, fearing Zarkon will take his grief out on the baby.

Zarkon turns on Alfor, blaming him for Honerva’s death and accusing him of letting her die so that he could get his way and close the rift. He lunges Alfor and roars at him to leave.

He spends the rest of the night grieving at Honerva’s bedside, when Kova jumps on the bed and starts gnawing on her finger trying to wake her up. This is what gives him the idea to bring her back with quintessence.

3. Her current relationship with Zarkon

I think it’s pretty safe to say that they’re relationship didn’t get better after the war began. Zarkon hid her identity and her child from her for 10,000 years and essentially used her as a tool of war. It’s pretty fucked up.

I know it’s pretty well established that Zarkon treats Haggar with more respect than his other underlings, but I feel like it would be interesting to see that change overtime. We see that after Voltron comes back, Zarkon becomes very obsessed with Voltron/Black, and he and Haggar start disagreeing more and more.

Remember the moment where one of Haggar’s druids told Zarkon Haggar said he needed to rest and Zarkon hit them with his bayard and told them, “remember who your master is”? What if, instead of a random druid, it was Haggar who he hit?

I feel like that would be a good way to show Haggar and the audience just how much Zarkon’s obsession with Voltron is affecting him, and make the audience feel a tiny bit bad for her.

Then later in season 4, when Zarkon wakes up from his coma and finds out Haggar brought Lotor back to take his place he gets pissed. He puts a price on Lotor’s head and has Haggar arrested for treason. She steals a ship, escapes, and later on meets up with Lotor’s generals.

Her and Zarkon are officially broken up and her quest to reclaim her identity and get her son back begins.

4. Oriande

I never liked the concept of chosen/sacred Alteans. The idea that some Alteans are just born more powerful than others just feels iffy. My idea of Oriande is that it’s an Altean holly land, any Altean can enter it just depends on whether or not you can pass the White Lion’s trial. Passing the trial proves that your intentions are pure and and the White Lion will bless you with power.

I didn’t like how Honerva seemed to force her way into Oriande, I think it would be more effective if she had gone through normally because, at this point, her intentions were pure. She was going there to purge herself of the dark magic corrupting her and reclaim her memories so she could go get her son back.

I also like the idea that Oriande is a sorta link to the Altean after life, and you can speak with people you’ve lost. Allura gets to speak with Alfor, and Honerva speaks with her mother.

You could also have her be confronted by the spirits of the Alteans she helped destroy. Have the weight of her past actions bear down on her. An important part of any redemption arc is acknowledging the terrible shit you’ve done in the past, and that was severely lacking in Honerva’s arc.

Another interesting thing you could do is have Honerva talk to her younger self. The one that died 10,000 years ago. This kinda thing actually happened in 80s Voltron, young Haggar appearing in Haggar’s head trying to convince her to be good again.

5. Her relationship with Lotor

Now this is where the redemption arc really falls apart. I forget who, but one of the writers said after S5 that Haggar/Honerva was motivated purely by love for her son, but man did they do a bad job of showing that.

And it would’ve been so easy to fix that problem, just have her not be horrible to him. Have them have actual civil conversations, have her protect and defend him. Don’t have her reject him as a fucking baby!

Imagine if, after Zarkon destroys Lotor’s planet, instead of immediately deciding to

exile him, Zarkon says that this is the final straw and he’s going to have Lotor executed. But Haggar speaks up to defend Him. There’s actually a scene in DOTU where Zarkon tries to kill Lotor and Haggar gets on her knees and begs for him to be spared. (Though the scene was mostly played for laughs.)

she asks for mercy and justifies it by saying it would be unwise to kill his only heir. It’s a weak argument, Lotor’s a half breed and couldn’t realistically take the throne, but Zarkon does concede, he still loves her after all, and has Lotor exiled.

And Haggar isn’t spying on him because she doesn’t trust him, but because she’s concerned for him. When Lotor confronts Haggar about sending her cronies after him, she says she knows he’s hiding something. Lotor asks if she’s threatening him, thinking she’s going to rat him out, but she says no, she’s not threatening him, she’s just trying to warn him against doing anything stupid because, with Zarkon seemingly on his death bed, the empire needs Lotor’s leadership.

At this point in the story, Haggar is questioning her loyalty to Zarkon, so I feel like it would make sense for her to be silently supporting Lotor from the shadows.

Then at the Kral Zera in season 5, It was weird to me how she was helping Lotor through Kuron while also telling him he couldn’t be emperor and trying to put Sendak on the throne. I feel like it would’ve made more sense for Sendak to just show up on his own without Haggar.

Haggar wouldn’t even be at the Kral Zera, she would just watch through Kuron.

And then we get to S6 when she actually reveals to Lotor that she’s his mom. This scene was just so poorly done. She never actually apologizes to him, she’s just like “yeah I forgot you were my kid and I never loved you, but were cool now right?” I remember when I saw S8E2 and it shows her after Lotor rejects her and she looks like she’s about to cry, I was just thinking, “this would be very emotional and sad IF she had actually apologized and made it clear that she genuinely loved him.” But she didn’t and I don’t know why!

And then we get to season 8, and of course everything in S8 is bad but Honerva’s story is particularly bad. She’s supposed to be motivated by love for Lotor yet she doesn’t act like she actually cares about him at all.

She manipulates his corpse and when she sees his gross melted body, she doesn’t even react that much. When a mother sees her child’s mutilated corpse, how do you think she reacts? Screaming? Crying?? Hurling??? But no. She’s just like, “...”

And then when she goes to the alternate reality and meets baby Lotor and he rejects her, her reaction isn’t disappointment or sadness, it’s anger and entitlement. She immediately decides, “ok, fuck this kid. Let’s destroy this reality.”

It just doesn’t make sense! This is the season you’re trying to REDEEM her! Why are you going out of your way to make her so vile?

6. Her S7-S8 plan

(Keep in mind I haven’t watched S7/S8 since they came out and barely even watched S8 to begin with, so I don’t remember some things and I can’t be bothered to rewatch them.)

Okay, starting with S7, she’s not in this season at all but in “The Ruins” the druid dude says that her final order was to hunt and destroy the Blade of Marmora. I guess it makes a certain amount of sense because she saw that it was Keith who brought Lotor’s actions to light, but that whole plot was really pointless in my opinion. (Was anybody really hoping for a rematch between Keith and that one random druid?)

If you want us to forgive Honerva for her crimes, you really shouldn’t keep adding more unnecessary crimes. It’s established that there were a lot of Galra war lords vying for power and pirates looking for money, just have it be that Kolivan got kidnapped by one of them.

Then you have her season 8 plan and I’m gonna be real with y’all, I have no idea how to fix this mess.

I feel like the basics of her plan could work. She tries to get Lotor and Sincline out of the rift but when she gets him he’s a melted corpse so the plan then becomes to use sincline to go to another reality to find a living Lotor, but opening all these rifts causes problems and the paladins have to stop her.

But all the shit with manipulating the colony Alteans, killing the White Lion, desecrating Oriande, and destroying Olkarion and entire realities, it was all so unnecessary.

Personally I would cut the colony Alteans from the story all together, there are other ways for Lotor to betray the team. It was a lazy way of making Lotor 100% evil and having Honerva manipulate them is unnecessarily cruel, especially in the season you’re trying to redeem her.

Here’s a very basic outline of how I would do this plot.

If we’re going by season 8’s logic that she needs a sacrifice to bring back Sincline, I would’ve had the Galra she killed at the Kral Zera be the sacrifice, not the White Lion. She stands on the pyramid and talks about how the empire stole her life from her and she wants revenge as she absorbs their quintessence into herself and then uses that to bring back Sincline.

Then when she finds Lotor dead she takes Sincline and uses it to go to another reality where she can be with her family.

The danger comes when she opens rifts to the other realities and rift creatures start coming out and causing damage. The paladins fight them and follow her into the rift to stop whatever evil plan she may have. Because the paladins don’t know that Haggar is now Honerva and all this is just to get Lotor back. They think this is all some plan for multiverse domination or some shit.

Meanwhile Honerva has just been rejected by little Lotor and seeing Voltron show up pushes her over the edge and they fight.

But when they find out the real reason she’s doing all this they start trying to appeal to her and convince her to give up and close the rift peacefully. And similarly to how the paladins had to sacrifice the castle to close the rifts created by the fight with Lotor, Honerva has to sacrifice herself to close the rifts.

In the end, I feel like a Honerva redemption arc could’ve worked if the writers were actually competent and actually made an effort to have her be sympathetic, but In canon, her reasoning, “If I can’t indulge in the simple joys of life, why should anybody else?” just doesn’t cut it.

It’s disappointing. VLD had so much potential. I’m thinking of just rewriting the entire series from the beginning. Hopefully putting all my thoughts out into the universe will help me move on.

[mk-wizard]

Big Hero 6 The Series: It could have been better

Hello, friends. Today, I will be analyzing a TV series based on a movie that I fell in love with for its colourful themes, deep plot, compelling characters, great CGI and memorable messages. Before I get into it, I want to take a moment to say that I have quit doing videos. They are too big of a pain in the petunia to make and I write better than I speak, so I will stick to writing essays, reviews and more. Anyway, onto the analysis.

All I can say about Big Hero 6 the series is that it had a great concept, it presented some great ideas and tried hard to be a cartoon of the times, but it could have and should have been a lot better. The show’s downfall all centers around trying too hard to be kid friendly which makes the shame sting all the more because Big Hero 6 was already kid friendly even with its dark themes, sharp edges and intelligent writing. If anything, even the brightest kid friendly cartoons (Steven Universe, She-Ra, etc.) had those things and actually benefitted from them. By needlessly trying too hard, character development got scrapped, the edges were all smoothed out, storytelling was subpar, the humour was too silly and the executive meddling in the end produced a dismal final season. However, I don’t want this analysis to be one lengthy negative rant about how awful the series was because in its defense, awful is an unfair word. It did have potential and ideas which are worth carrying over to a reboot that I hope will be done someday in the future. Also, we should root for a reboot because Big Hero 6 would not be the first story that needs it before striking gold. Just look at how many times Spider-Man was rebooted in film before MCU found the version that worked. Anyway, I will list all the things in Big Hero 6 that could have been better in my opinion;

1- Go easy on the laughs and be more generous with the action. - I love adding comedy to my own writing because I think a good sense of humour makes everything better, but Big Hero 6 is not a stand up comedy routine. It is a superhero story where we expect action, suspense and life or death situations that are to be taken seriously first. The comedy should be for relief and with the right timing. Also, the chibi cutscenes and having characters act like fools aren’t funny. Ren and Stimpy are the exception not the standard and their way of making you laugh doesn’t fit an action series. In a show as big as Big Hero 6, real life physics and danger matters.

2- Make the villains menacing and gritty. - I admit that after having a movie villain like Yokai who was the stuff of nightmares, it is going to be a challenging act to follow, but it was obvious that the writers were trying especially with some villains who could have easily gone into some dark relatable territory. For example, Mr. Sparkles (the gentleman in the photo above) embodies social media and Internet personalities. Right off the bat, you have a long list of things which embody the dark side of that like scams, fraud, using social media to dox or harass, driving people to suicide, online predators, the Internet personalities being very depressed people in real life, and much more horrifying things. When you stop and look at it, Mr. Sparkles even looks like the Joker which hints how dark and scary he could have been if the stops were removed. The same goes for enemies like Hardlight who embodies online gaming, Liv with cloning, Obake an amoral and insane scientist, and Trina and Noodle Burger Boy (more on him later) being evil robots. Globby especially should have been painted and written in much darker colours rather being played off for laughs because he has many parallels with Clay Face. The only two villains who I can say were supposed to be campy, charming and comical were Baron Von Steamer and Supersonic Sue because they were a satire of the Adam West style villains.

The rest of them needed to be dark and threatening including Mr. Sparkles. In fact, I would love a rebooted version of Mr. Sparkles who gives me the heebie-jeebies. Going back to Noodle Burger Boy, I must confess that I was actually excited when I heard that he was going to be the main villain of the final season because I thought he was going to fulfill his master’s final wish and as a reminder, Noodle Burger Boy was based on a super robot for military purposes.

It would have been fantastic if Noodle Burger Boy was upgraded into a full military war machine with a new threatening look. For that, I think all of the villains deserve to be rebooted and have their full potential unlocked for better or for worse.

3- A show about geniuses merits genius level art quality. - I am usually forgiving towards art styles, but in the case of Big Hero 6, the oversimplified style with minimal details and lack of textures did not suit the show. The characters blend in with the background which makes them look flat and the special effects were extremely dulled down. I also know for a fact that Disney can do a lot better than this because I saw how superbly Tangled the Series was drawn.

You can see and almost feel the difference in quality, the number of layers and level of detail between the two styles. I think there was no excuse Big Hero 6 was not done in the same style and at the same level if not better as Tangled.

3- Don’t dumb down or flanderize amazing characters. - I absolutely detest it when characters are flanderized because it makes them one dimensional and grating. For example, Go Go is tough as nails and extremely calm, but she is not cold or hesitant towards helping her friends. She doesn’t require very special episodes for us to know that. If anything, the movie version of Go Go reminded me a lot of Garnet in how she deconstructed the broody character. She isn’t cold or emotionless. Just calm and mature. Another good example was how Honey Lemon was rewritten to be overly positive to the point of toxicity, naïve and oblivious with a juvenile obsession with stickers. Then you have poor Fred who was rewritten to be an incompetent fool. The spark that makes Big Hero 6 shine is that they are a team of geniuses meaning they are all intelligent. Even Fred is genius in his own way just not a scientific one. He has a vivid imagination, he is resourceful and can get himself out of tight spots. Please, don’t turn characters into dummies especially if their intelligence is a part of them. It doesn’t make them better or funnier. It ruins them.

4- Tadashi needs closure and honour. - I am all for Hiro making peace with the loss of his brother, but Tadashi is to the Big Hero 6 team what Uncle Ben was to Spider-Man. His loss was the catalyst if not the reason. He should never be forgotten. Moreover, there was never any true closure to him especially with the possibility that he may still be alive up in the air. After all, like Callaghan, his body was never found and it turned out that Callaghan was still alive.

With that said, who is to say that Tadashi was not secretly still alive and just hiding or being hidden? This is something that Disney really needed to clear up if not for the fans, then at least as a service to such an important character. Never just forget about them.

5- The format can only be episodic with a deep plots, continuity and character development. - Random episodes with a mere monster of the day is an outdated format which doesn’t fit Big Hero 6′s modern and bright setting. In seasons 1 and 2, when the episodes were plot heavy with character development, the series shined brightest. It also helped move the story along, but with the final season, plot was removed, closure was abandoned or poorly written if any was given, and characters were disallowed from growing. A good example at how plot and character development could have made this series and its characters better was the relationship between Hiro and Megan. Would it have truly survived or would they have broken up?

Would Richardson Mole have eventually lost interest in his obsession with besting and bullying Fred or would his obsession consume him compelling him to become a super villain? I do see quite a few similarities between Mole and Reverse Flash.

Then you have Karmi who is in my opinion, the biggest wild card of the bunch. She was intentionally introduced as an arrogant, prickly and unlikable yet complex character who rivaled Hiro bitterly.

Yet had a huge crush on his alter ego and as time went on, started to grow up and even form a friendship with Hiro. What would have happened further down the road with her? Would she have become a super hero herself? Or maybe even another love interest for Hiro kind of like how Black Cat is for Spider-Man?

Is Obake really gone?

What does the future hold Diana (Liv’s clone), Liv herself or the Sycorax the genetics company?

Is Alistair Krei going to become an ally to Big Hero 6 or an antagonist? There is also the issue at how little we know about the other Big Hero 6 characters other than Fred, Hiro and Baymax. What are Honey Lemon, Wasabi and Go Go’s backstories? These questions matter and while not every mystery can be solved, leaving none of them solved is lazy writing.

6- Executives, kindly stay out of the writing and any other part of the creative process. - I’m sorry, execs, but there is no nice way to say it. History itself proves that every time executives got involved in the creative process of any media, it got worse not better. Leave the writing to the creative team and the execs should only handle the legal stuff. Please. We understand that TV is a business, but writing itself is not. It is an art which you just don’t have a talent for. Let the creative people do their thing with the freedom necessary and you do your thing, deal? Deal.

7- Focus on Hiro and Baymax. - The are the main characters so keep them at the heart of the series no matter what happens around them. That is all I can say.

And that sums up all the things that could have made Big Hero 6 the series better, but this is all just my opinion. What is yours?

PS: I am well aware that the Big Hero 6 series is being retconned because a new series called Baymax is in the works as well as the long awaited sequel to the first movie. I am looking forward to both with an open mind. PPS: I also am aware that some people liked this show the way it was including the art style and I am cool with that. An analysis for art that includes cartoons is never right or wrong. It is solely based on opinion. I may have thought this series could have been better, but there are people who make arguments that it could have been worse.

[justafandomfollower]

Thoughts on Stargirl S02E01

Season 2 is here! So, I watched the first episode last night and, while I don’t often do this for TV shows I watch, wanted to share/write up my thoughts about the episode. I mean, overall, I thought it was really good and I was grinning like a loon to see the familiar characters back onscreen. But, more than that, I had some thoughts on individual characters.

First, I really really liked the way they handled Courtney’s “overworking” as Stargirl. A lot of other shows would have the debate about how being Stargirl is dangerous and she’s just a teenager, etc., etc. But they hashed that out last season, and they’re not bringing it up again here, which should be the bare minimum but ends up just being refreshing. Pat never says she needs to put away the staff (except for that last bit where he grounds her, and even that’s temporary). Instead, he cautions her to find a balance between the superhero and non-superhero parts of her life, to pass her classes, get good grades, get some sleep, learn to take breaks every now and again, and think about her future.

I do think Courtney will ultimately be proven right about the threats that are out there (I mean, duh, we saw Cindy and Eclipso right there), but nothing Pat said was wrong, or telling her that there were no threats. So, yeah. Big fan of that part. As for Green Lantern’s daughter, while Courtney was her usual “act first, think later” self, I also kind of can’t blame her, because someone did sneak into their house and steal important JSA relics. There were faults on both sides here.

The rest of my thoughts I’ve thrown under a read-more because it’s long and rambling:

I’m pretty solid and happy with where the other three JSA kids are at the moment, but I figured I’d still break it down a little.

Yolanda: I like that she’s struggling with what she did, even months later. I like that she knows she can’t say anything at church, I like that she’s still able to talk about it with Courtney, and I like that Courtney was supportive without outright agreeing with or condemning her actions. It’s a tough thing for kids to talk about, and while an experienced adult like Pat might be able to understand it better, I like that Yolanda’s not completely bottling it up.

On that note, though, they said Cindy might have gotten crushed when the satellite came down, “like Brainwave”, so there’s a possibility here that nobody else knows what Yolanda did, which’ll be interesting to see play out, if that’s true.

Rick: Again, I like where he’s at. He’s more confident in who he is, a little more settled, but also still lost. He claims Tyler as his name again and knows he’s a hero, but he doesn’t know where he goes from here. I think that’s part of why he’s seeking out Grundy, because he’s still clinging to that part of his past because he doesn’t have any clue of what’s in his future.

He’s still very much an angry teenager new at being a superhero, ranting to that teacher about how he saved her, but knowing his character (and acknowledging how crappy that teacher was), I can’t entirely blame him for that. Was it a good move? No. Did it make sense? Absolutely.

Speaking of that teacher, she was not a good one. Can I understand her wariness about the bad boy of the school suddenly getting every answer right? Sure. But, 1) it’s been months, so surely there’s been some gradual improvement, 2) that’s not the way to do it; talk to him about it, sure, but don’t refuse to accept his explanations, and 3) refusing to accept his name change is a jerk move that a figure of authority shouldn’t be making. I could wave away the first one from TV-time-skipping-magic, but not the other two. I don’t really think we’ll see this character again (but maybe in summer school), but she’s more of a vessel to show us 1) how Rick’s changed and 2) how the way others see him hasn’t, so, I suppose, in that regard, she did her job.

Beth: It’s neat that the goggles still seem to be (mostly) working, but it’s the AI that’s not functioning. Not the route I’d thought they’d go, but it’s really interesting because it gives Beth a chance to expand her skill set, or at least expand it to the viewer, and give her a role as a coder/computer scientist. It also doesn’t cheapen the “death” of the AI that happened last season.

Also, like the others (Rick at school with the teachers, Courtney and Yolanda having a discussion in the middle of main street, even Pat with STRIPE), she’s not great at hiding her activities. They’re just goggles, maybe, and she could explain them away fairly easy, but I don’t like the way she just leaves them out around the house. I’m okay with it for now because 1) she’s a teenager, still learning, and they are pretty innocuous, 2) some of it’s probably just TV “requirements”, like not wanting to cut from scene to scene or whatever (idk, I’m not in the TV business), and 3) her parents seem pretty clueless.

And speaking of her parents, man did I not like them even more this season. Every time I saw them on screen my mind went straight to: “good people, terrible parents”. Did they ever even want a kid, or did they just like the idea of having a kid to fit into their “perfect lives” until even that wasn’t enough to keep them together? They’re barely aware of what Beth does on a day to day basis, she still seems to be the one doing all the cooking, and they forget to tell her they’re coming home late? Bad parenting, and selfish parenting at that.

Overall, my mood about Beth this episode can be summed up like this: Do I like Beth struggling? No. Does it open up possibilities for what could be a really intriguing character arc? Yeah.

My biggest complaint about our JSA is that there weren’t really any scenes of them together, but that’s more of the time constraints of having so many characters we needed to get concrete information on regarding where they stand. They had that nice patrol scene in the beginning to let us know they’re all still solid friends, so I’m happy enough with that for now.

Other thoughts:

Barbara wasn’t really in it much (no mention of her job, though the newspaper article did say something about The American Dream going through changes after the death of its leader or something like that), but I can sympathize with her wanting a vacation and not getting one. It’ll be interesting to see how okay she is with Courtney as Stargirl as things get more dangerous.

Mike, likewise, wasn’t much present, but it’s clear he’s still struggling to be a part of things. Pat wasn’t wrong, when he said that the discipline, etc. from having a job was important, but it still feels like he’s brushing Mike aside and not letting him be involved, so I can see some more resentment brewing this season. Better than last season, but c’mon Pat. Mike just wants to help. Still, hopefully we’ll get a better idea of where Mike stands in future episodes.

Artemis. Really interesting the way she brushed aside her parents being in jail as them being wrongly convicted. I’ve seen Young Justice, so I’m looking forward to seeing if they turn her into a villain or hero here.

Zeek. (Is that how he spelled it? It looked like that on his hat.) I’m, probably unnecessarily, wary of how interested he was in working with Pat at the show (does he know something?) but for now I’m mostly just mildly amused at his “I don’t care what you do on your time, but hey, do you think that robot could use a flamethrower?”. Also. Pat. C’mon man. You’ve been in this business for decades. Hide your robot better. (Though, I’ll admit, he was only resigned when he realized Zeek had found it, so... Did he have an excuse ready? Did he just not read Zeek as a threat? I’m probably reading too much into this, but it’ll again be interesting to see where it goes.)

Cameron’s back, seemingly unaware of everything, and it looks like his murderous grandparents are taking care of him. Not great, but, eh, we’ll see what happens.

Sylvester is still tracking down Pat. I’m a little bit glad the landlord either didn’t give him, or didn’t have, Pat’s information from that end scene last season. I’m also interested to see if Maggie (Mike’s Mom, if my understanding of comics I haven’t read is correct) sticks around. Sylvester seems supremely unworried and in a mostly good mood, despite his desire to track down Pat, so I really want to know what’s up with him. I’ve seen some fan theories of time travel and him being a displaced Starman, which could be interesting, but I have no idea if they’re accurate. He certainly seems to be the real deal, at least with all the right memories.

Cindy and Eclipso. That opening scene was creepy, and made me question if I’d turned on the right show, and the connection with the McNider family is really interesting. Did not like the way she had Mike’s picture, but from a writing POV I really liked it. I don’t want Mike to go villain, but I mostly trust the writers to see how this plays out.

Other thoughts: The town seems to have moved on from the mind control/satellite-dish-from-the-football-field thing, so I’m guessing there weren’t too many causalities. New principal makes sense, and I like that they didn’t need to shove it in our face to remind us what happened to the old one (plus that scene where Courtney bumps into her kid; nice and simple and shows a little of how he’s coping). I appreciate that Henry hasn’t been forgotten. No glimpse of Yolanda’s home life yet, or Rick’s uncle. No idea how Rick managed to change his name, but the threat he was hiding from is more or less gone, so it makes sense.

I may have forgotten something here or there, but anyone who’s made it this far deserves a cookie, so, thanks for reading! I’m always up for discussion if anyone wants to add on or debate any of my points.

[lizacstuff]

Bölüm 45 asks

Plus a few asks from 44, and one about the fragman for 46

Read more under the cut

Anonymous asked: I cannot believe that Ayse revived the "Kemal is Serkan's real father" theory but I think I'm down for it? At least now Kiraz has one decent grandparent and he seems like genuinely nice man. I've been wishing for him to have some scenes with Serkan because the way they set up this S2 plot, they could relate to one another and I was sad to see that he spent 5 years hiding instead

I'm down for this plot! See, now that I know they're doing the long-lost-father plot, it makes all the sense in the world why Serkan doesn't like Kemal and they didn't forge a relationship in the last five years. If they had, then finding out he's his dad would have been a lot less jarring and dramatic. Finding out now and then forging the relationship I think will be a bit more meaty story so it works for me.

To me this story works on a lot of levels, and makes sense with who Serkan is and his very strained relationship with Alptekin. It's like Alptekin sensed it, and resented Serkan his whole life. For those worried that Serkan will no longer have the last name Bolat, I'm not sure where that's coming from. Maybe I'm just not familiar with other cultures, but that is his name, Alptekin raised him, adults don't just up and change their name because of genetics. If you're adopted and you meet your bio dad as an adult, you don't change your name to your bio dad's.

Serkan's name is very much a part of his identity. Which is why this story has so much potential, because it could shake Serkan to his very core to find out who he thought he was, was wrong. He thought he was unlovable, most importantly maybe he'll finally realize there was more at play there and it wasn't at fault.

Anonymous asked: There were a couple things in the last episode that didn't sit well with me. 1. I can't believe Eda made Serkan sleep outside at night and didn't feel bad in the morning when she realized he got sick! 2. The way Seyfi announced Aydan and Kemal's secret relationship. It wasn't his secret to tell, though Aydan did deserve the way everyone reacted. So I got over that pretty quick. 3. Burak!!! He's not the one for Melo. She deserves better and if they end up together in the end, I'm gonna protest.

1. Unless you're going to put the same energy into not believing that Serkan had the gal to remove his bed on the floor as a way to maneuver himself into Eda's bed before she was ready, I really can't relate. It was done for comedy, my advice is to unclench and just giggle along.

2. Or you could look at it as being unfair of Aydan to burden Seyfi with that secret and require he lie to his other employer for five years. I mean I don't disagree that it wasn't his secret to tell, but Aydan had plenty of chances, and it was time for it to come out.

3. This one we are in 100% agreement about. MELO DESERVES BETTER. I will die on this hill.

Anonymous asked: Hi! Do you think Serkan actually believes in Kerem's abilities (he trusts Eda's faith in Kerem) or is this part of his plan to win Eda back? Either way I'm okay, just wondering what you think.

No, I do not think he gained a sudden belief in Kerem's abilities, but I do think he believes in Eda. And if Eda believes in Kerem then when push comes to shove that is enough for Serkan. Of course, he did it as part of his plan to win Eda back. Serkan is taking every opportunity to let Eda know that he respects her and believes in her and I think this was another example of that. There was also an aspect of him trying to win over another person in Eda's circle who was suspicious of him. The fewer people he has working against him, the better! He knows he has no shot with Burak or Ayfer, so this episode he worked on Melo and Kerem. But mostly it was him trying to make Eda's life easier, by smoothing over a personnel problem she was having, thus making working out of Art Life a more attractive option for her. All of those things in one!

Anonymous asked: What do you think about Eda and Piril's friendship? This episode really highlighted how close they've gotten.

Yes, they have gotten close, and I'm happy Eda has a friend, but at the same time I don't trust Piril. This is a woman who discarded Eda and embraced Selin when she was manipulating and abusing a brain-damaged Serkan.

Eda might be able to forget, but I can't. Also as a character she's just boring, rigid and humorless. One of my least favorites on screen.

That being said I do like the triad dynamic of Kiraz/Can, Serkan/Engin, and Eda/Piril, it was fun when they were calling each other at the same time.

Anonymous asked: Idk if they reached out to Maya just because she looked like Hande considering she had no acting experience, but this little girl is like the best casting I've seen. The chemistry with Hande and Kerem is amazing. She's so expressive. I am a Kiraz stan.

She's doing a fantastic job, precious thing! I have no idea how they found her, I know she was an instagram model, but the SCK casting director strikes again. This season doesn't work if we don't fall in love with Kiraz. Thankfully, we did!

Anonymous asked: Hi! Since it seems that we will have 13 episodes, do you think that Edser reconciliation/wedding will be left for the finale, 12-13 ep? Cause Ayse loves to drag and keep them apart.

I think the wedding might be closer to the end, but I think reconciliation will be a bit sooner than that.

However, I have to say that it's really not like they're apart.. is it? I mean this episode we had them living together, sort of casually planning their future together. Next episode we have them pretending to be married and ramping up the sexual tension to white-hot-sun levels, these are all good things. With episodes like this, I don't personally consider the show dragging it out.

In fandom I see a lot of peeps upset because Eda isn't getting immediately back with Serkan and I am feeling inpatient as well, do you think the writers are making a mistake keeping them apart?

Again, I guess my response to you is, by what definition was this episode "keeping them apart?"

Yes, they aren't having sex, but they are living together, working together, raising their daughter together, and I'm a-okay with having a couple of delicious episodes of that while they are still not fully back together romantically. Let's be real, they're still waking up in bed together, flirting, and having a romantic dinner together, so it's not like things aren't moving forward, they are. I'd advise putting aside your impatience, and just sit back, relax, and let the story take its course. There is no need to be anxious with this one. They are going to end up with their happily ever after together, but what we're seeing right now is delightful. It's them in family and domestic situations, them with their child. Most shippers only dream of getting to see this.

This sort of goes back to my stance on episodes 16-24, I know that was a frustrating time for a lot of fans because they were "broken up" but I've always said they may have been officially broken up, but they were in a committed relationship that entire time. And I enjoyed those episodes from that perspective, that tension of them being "apart" but still functioning as a unit and still being emotionally tied together underneath it all. There's kind of a similar situation here, they aren't officially back together, Eda is resisting him, but they are in a committed relationship and I don't understand what the need is to rush through this part? Enjoy the sexual tension of them living together, but not sleeping together. Enjoy the rom com romp of Serkan trying to get in her bed, and Eda taking steps to keep him out. Enjoy their daughter putting them in situations that force them into close proximity, and enjoy them falling into easy compatibility without even trying. Enjoy Serkan planning romantic dinners, and Eda enjoying it despite her every effort to protect her heart.

To me this is very good stuff, and spending this time being impatient and wanting what didn't happen yet, instead of enjoying what did happen is pretty much the recipe for unhappiness not just with this show, but life.

Anonymous asked: i feel like i've seen the exact same frustrations ppl have had with eda right now back around the 20s too after serkan told her about her parents' secret. it was like, now that he's told her the truth, she should automatically forgive him and get back together. same thing happening here, with him accepting his role as kiraz's father. it feels like the same impatience that's put on eda to just forgive him already bc everyone wants happy edser and she's in the way lol.. like girl needs time!

Agreed, and it makes me wonder if these folks have ever watched television before, lmao. Patience! There's a story unfolding and from the first 6 episodes it's clear they have a season long arc planned. All in due time.

Eda spent five years thinking that Serkan stopped loving her, and discarded her for work. The second time he used that excuse to break her heart. My goodness, it's more than okay if she needs a little time to adjust and learn how to trust him again. PLUS that means we get to watch him work on her, try to make inroads, romance her, forge a relationship with his daughter and earn Eda's trust back. What's bad in that?

What did you think of the fragman? It's kind of dumb and unrealistic that they have to dance for a school admission interview.

LMAO. Yes, yes it is, but my question to you is, sana ne?

I mean why do you care if the set up is dumb or not? Or if it's realistic? It's a device to get Serkan and Eda to pretend to be married before they're fully back together and an excuse for us to see Edser smash themselves together in a sensual tangle of limbs while they pretend to be unaffected, while both are being engulfed in USTy flames.

I'm not complaining, why are you?

Come on, this show is silly, it has been from day one, enjoy the fact that we are getting silly plots that force our couple into hilarious and hot situations, because Hande and Kerem are going to give us gold, I guarantee it and I'm going to smile through every second watching it.

xxxxxxxxxx

These asks are from episode 44, they came in and I didn't have time to answer before 45 aired:

Anonymous asked: Do you think there is a point when there are too many “parallels” and it becomes more like scenes are being recycled? Because I kinda felt that way in the last episode. Like she’s just tossing in as many things as she can from those first 11 episodes but I’ve already watched those and Id rather we focus more character progression. I feel like they regressed from those honest conversations last week and were back to being petty this week.

I guess my answer is... no, I don't think there have been too many parallels. Episode 44 was partly about truth bubbling to the surface, with the biggest truth being that Serkan has been in love with Eda every minute of every day since they parted. That is a very important thing for Eda to understand and know and they really can't move forward until she does, because she felt unloved and forgotten all those years. Most of the parallels were illustrating that by showing that he held on to their history, he remembered their history and he honored it. Okay by me.

Anonymous asked: There were some amazing dialogues in the episode. I have two that tie for top. One was when Kiraz said that Serkan was her wish (when blowing her birthday candles), and the other was when Serkan said Apollo was never going to give up on the woman he loves nor on the cherries! Oh my heart had feels both times. What were your favourite dialogues in the episode?

Oh man my head is in 45 now, but both of those examples of yours were great. I loved both of them.

The other than springs to mind is while fishing, Eda telling Serkan that he didn't need to be perfect for Kiraz to love him, he just had to be himself.

Swoon.

That's so important for Serkan to hear, because he doesn't think he's worthy of love as himself, so hearing that from Eda is impactful.

Anonymous asked: reading your ep review, i think a big reason some people are hanging on to hate the s2 plot no matter what are just bc they hate the writer. of course not everyone, but a lot of people will just hate on anything she writes out of spite, even if objectively the episode is very good. idk why that is or when ppl decided they hated her but it's not warranted at all imo. i can understand not liking the premise of this season, but after watching it so far there has been SUCH an improvement edser-wise.

People can like, dislike, love, hate anything they want. Consuming entertainment doesn't have to be a team sport. That being said, from what I've seen I'd agree with your assessment. Teams have formed (Anti-Ayse, Pro-Ayse, etc) and the former are too invested in hating everything she does, the former possibly too forgiving at times. That's their choice, but I have to say I feel bad for the anti brigade, this is a show they loved, and most of them are still watching, but they've completely sabotaged themselves from finding any joy in any of it and I think they're going to regret it once it's over.

Also season 2 is so much better than I thought it could be. I honestly thought there was no way to get back to the early quality, but it's here. The show is really watchable and fun this season, and it's a shame for those who've let their attitudes get so negative that they can't enjoy it.

Anonymous asked: Ok so I'm aware this would be highly uncharacteristic of a dizi - but if they know there's only 6 eps left, my dream would be no more big bad events and just spend it rebuilding EdSer as a couple and a family. Would that be too much to ask lol. They've jumped from one disaster to another. Since we're at the end & they have the luxury of knowing it, I just want to see them working through things as a real unit. They've dated for like 7 eps out of 45? Can we get that above 10 at least????

Congratulations! Because that's exactly what we've gotten so far in season 2. Once we got past the trauma of the 5 year time jump, all the drama has been internal to Eda and Serkan and their relationship. The whole season so far has been about rebuilding Edser as a couple and a family. And if you're watching without the tauntruming twitter teens in your ear, you'd realize we ARE watching them work through things as a real unit.

I'll say this until I'm blue in the face (apparently) just because they are not currently sexing each other up, does not mean they aren't emotionally doing all the things necessary to reach their full potential as a couple.

They are. It's happening. Enjoy it.

[thekisforkeats]

The Joys of Fandom, or, how TMA helped me rediscover my love of tea

So among the many (many) good things The Magnus Archives podcast has brought to my life, none has been quite so profound as remembering how much I love making a good cup of tea. I’ve got a whole post about how it’s helped me categorize the anxiety cloud I live with on a constant basis, how it’s gotten me writing again, and writing poetry which I haven’t done in forever, how identifying with so many openly queer boys going through so much crap has helped me figure out that I want to transition.

But.

Tea is the reason we’re here today, because making a pot of tea has become a daily ritual since I started listening to TMA, and it’s been one of those tiny things that’s changed my life profoundly, and I have TMA to thank for this almost entirely.

I did not grow up drinking tea. I am from the Seattle, Washington area, and I’m just old enough Starbucks was a popular local coffee shop when I was a kid. My parents both drank a TON of coffee, my mother basically runs on the stuff, and by the time I was 6 I was drinking coffee too. Tea, growing up, was Lipton, sometimes iced or sometimes not. I didn’t even realize herbal tea was tea. Green tea was a thing one drank at Chinese restaurants. I was not at all informed.

When I got my first job, I would stop at Starbucks during the bus layover (as once does in the Seattle area) and one day in a fit of teenaged desire to be “cool” and “writerly” because I’d seen a tin of “Writer’s Chai” in the store I bought a chai latte. I loved it, and that became my go-to Starbucks drink.

I still didn’t really get tea, but I at least started learning how to boil water in the kettle and waiting for it to actually boil, pouring it over the tea bag, etc. I didn’t put in milk or sugar because I drank coffee black unless it was a latte or a mocha. I would just sort of... boil the water and pour it over and wait a few minutes and drink the tea with the bag still in the mug.

It wasn’t until I moved to Toronto that I sat down and had a good cup of tea. The woman who hosted the social group I was part of had her particular tea-making rituals, and she encouraged me to try it with milk and sugar, and it was... amazing. Life-changing, even. My perseveration drive kicked into full swing and I had to know everything about tea and its history and how to make a proper cup and so on and so forth. I learned all I could from our hostess, and then turned to the internet.

I bought a kettle to make tea at home but my ex wasn’t really supportive of my desire to brew tea on the regular, so loose leaf and teapots and “does the milk go in in cup before or after the tea” had to wait until I moved out and got a place of my own.

Then I moved to Tallahassee.

In Tallahassee, the coffee was atrocious unless it was from a couple of specific places, mostly serving cafe con leche. But I had my own place and my own dishes and I could have a teapot and make tea and nobody could stop me. So I did. Mostly for myself, while I was contemplating things, and it was really nice to sit and stare out at the ridiculously heavy Florida rain--which hit, in Tallahassee, right about 4:15 in the afternoon all summer so perfect for tea time.

I moved back to Seattle with my spouse, and we moved into my mother’s house. For a long while we didn’t have a kitchen of our own and we had small children, so tea wasn’t a thing I did any more. I had leftover coffee (or canned/bottled coffee) for the caffeine fix, but rarely tea. When my grandmother died and we moved into her old apartment we didn’t have a stove, and I despise heating water for tea in the microwave.

So for the better part of a decade, I barely drank any tea at all. I did discover Oi Ocha in this time, which is bottled green tea from Japan, which is amazing and I love it, but again--it was in a bottle. Not a thing I was personally making.

Then I started listening to The Magnus Archives, and I really identified with Martin Blackwood, because of reasons too complicated to get into here. But it inspired me to want to make tea again, and so I started getting K-cup pods, but it just... wasn’t... right. It wasn’t the same. I mean, it was tea, but it wasn’t... tea.

So I went and bought an electric kettle, and a teapot, and a strainer, and ordered regular deliveries of loose leaf tea, and started making tea for myself and my spouse. I developed my own ritual: cold water in the kettle, put hot water into the teapot (so it doesn’t crack), put three scoops of loose leaf in the strainer. Pour out the water in the teapot when the kettle boils, put in the strainer, pour the boiling water over the strainer. Wait four minutes or so, and while you’re waiting put a splash of half-and-half in the tea mugs (milk goes first so it doesn’t scald and we like the taste of half-and-half best). Then pour the tea into the mugs. The mugs are big enough that I take three spoons of sugar and my spouse four, so put all the sugar into the mugs and then increase the entropy (aka stir) until the sugar’s dissolved. Bring the tea out into the living room, enjoy.

The first time I got it all right, and made a good cup of tea, I literally cried, I was so happy. It was like seeing the sun after it had been dark for so long I’d forgotten what the sun looked like.

The thing I have come to realize about what tea means to me is something that Jon says in the trailer for Season 5 of TMA. Martin brings him a cup of “tea” and Jon goes “that’s not tea” and, indeed, it turns out to be some weird skittering thing. The following exchange really crystallized things for me:

Jon: This is no longer a world where you can trust-- Martin: Tea?! Jon: Comfort.

And that was it, right there. Coffee is fuel, for me. Coffee is “Wake Up, Get Up, Get Out There.” (Quite literally; part of playing Persona 5 was remembering how much I love trying out new coffee blends.)

Tea, however, is comfort. Tea is slowing down. Tea is caffeine, yes, and therefore focus for my poor ADD/autistic brain, but it’s afternoon focus. It’s contemplation. It’s sitting and breathing in the aroma and thinking about things in a way that isn’t spiraling or catastrophizing. Whether it’s breakfast tea or Earl Grey or green tea, or an herbal like peppermint or chamomile, tea for me is self-care.

Taking those few minutes to get up and go make a pot of tea in the afternoon, to stop the business of the day and just stand there waiting for the kettle to boil, is something I’ve desperately needed. Coffee is easy to sort of make as “fire and forget,” to the point that I’ve gulped down cold or lukewarm coffee I’d forgotten about just because I need the caffeine. Tea, though, if you’re doing it right you have to stand there and wait for the water to boil and wait for the tea to steep. If you walk away to do something else you’ll ruin the whole thing. I completely understand why Martin is running around making tea for everyone in Season 2 all the time, because everything is falling apart in slow motion and it’s a chance to stop, to focus on making the tea, and then to take the time enjoying the tea itself.

Making tea for others also means love to me. I make tea for my spouse alongside myself. I included one of my teenaged children in tea-making for the first time yesterday and my youngest keeps getting the last bit of tea in the pot, and it’s such a joy to see their faces light up. Bringing someone tea means bringing them a mug of love and care. Another reason I identify with Martin--I often don’t know what to say to help someone, so I try to be sure they’re fed and hydrated and cared for. And I, too, had to learn to stop setting myself on fire to keep those people warm. I had to learn to be sure I was fed and hydrated and cared for, so I could care for them. But even now as I get older and wiser and grumpier I still run around making sure everyone’s fed and has had their mug of tea, I just don’t do it at my own expense anymore.

One of my next crochet projects is a tea cozy in the shape of a green owl, in honor of the Magnus Institute owl, because my little tea-making ritual is always going to be connected to TMA in my head. Also I have a “Fifteen Fears” mug and my spouse has a “Magnus Archives” owl symbol mug, so it’s literally just this really intense connection between TMA and tea, for me.

It’s funny how much comfort a horror podcast has given me since I’ve started listening. There are a few fandoms that have profoundly changed me--Star Trek was the first big one, Babylon 5 was the first that directly inspired me, Mass Effect helped me get out of suicidal depression, Persona (specifically Persona 5) inspired me to take responsibility for myself in a way therapy never quite managed.

And here I am with TMA, figuring out how to navigate anxiety and pain and grief in a world that feels like it’s falling apart around my ears. The concept that what we do matters; that right or wrong you should be making a decision instead of just reacting from fear or surprise; that sometimes you screw up and there’s nothing to be done, that “sorry” doesn’t fix everything, that sometimes nothing you do will fix anything and you can’t let that paralyze you... it’s all been necessary, and helpful, and I’ve been terribly grateful.

Thanks to TMA I’m writing again after years of terrible writer’s block. I’m facing my own fears and accepting that despite (because of?) my terrible arachnophobia I’d probably serve the Web if I served anything (although Eye and Lonely would also get a look in--I did say I identified with Martin pretty strongly). I’m recognizing dysphoria and dealing with it after years of trying to deny the elephant in the room.

I’m also making tea again. And for that, I am eternally, profoundly grateful.

[lilydalexf]

Old School X is a project interviewing X-Files fanfic authors who were posting fic during the original run of the show. New interviews are posted every Tuesday.

Interview with Sarah Ellen Parsons

Sarah Ellen Parsons has 18 X-Files stories at Gossamer and 19 at AO3. If you want high quality fic with interesting characters, go read her stories. Some of my favorites of her fics are The Crouching Thing and My Constant Touchstone Who Makes Me A Whole Person (which are two very different stories!). Big thanks to Sarah Ellen for doing this interview.

Does it surprise you that people are still interested in reading your X-Files fanfics and others that were posted during the original run of the show (1993-2002)?

With today's binge-watching culture, I'm not at all surprised. You can watch a bunch of eps and then seek out fic that is where you are in the series.

What do you think of when you think about your X-Files fandom experience? What did you take away from it?

I took away a writer's group Yes, Virginia, that is still together.  Mostly as friends, but whenever I write something, or someone else writes something, it's the first place we all run for machete beta. I have betad SO MANY novels.

We have a number of folks who are published writers since then and our time in X-Files fic brought us lifelong friendships IRL and made us all better at our craft. The majority of those folks were better writers than I am. And I make my living as a writer in my day-job.

Social media didn't really exist during the show's original run. How were you most involved with the X-Files online (atxc, message board, email mailing list, etc.)?

I belonged to a couple of the largest lists and posted there and bitched about the show on usenet with everyone else.  We had our own Yahoo group for beta.  We all had crappy GeoCities websites that we programmed the HTML for ourselves and hooked through various fandom link circles to get traffic to our stories.  But the main method of distribution was the lists.

Fun fact, I found a free page counter thing that I used at work one time through fandom. So fandom pays off in skillz.

Even without social media, we managed to get our stories in front of readers who would enjoy them. Where there's a will, there's always someone ready to step up and find a way.

What did you take away from your experience with X-Files fic or with the fandom in general?

Again, I have lifelong friends IRL that I got solely from fanfiction. That's the best takeaway.

Fandom disappointed me because it, like everything else, is ruined by people's egos, backstabbing, and petty people who get in positions of power and then use those positions to punch down or dictate. I was young when I was writing X-Files and I still had hope that people would rise to their better natures, so I got involved in various futile efforts to try to make people behave the way I wanted them to behave, I guess. I did a lot of public bitching that didn't serve me or my friends well. I now put that effort into politics, where it does actual good.

What was it that got you hooked on the X-Files as a show?

X-files was made for me. It combined science fiction, mystery, horror.  I love all of those genres. Plus there was Scully. No matter how sexist that writer's room was, Scully was awesome. But you kept seeing bad writing. Even in the heyday seasons, like Season 3, there were really terrible eps that made you want to fix things.

I'm a lifelong speculative fiction fan and a published feminist science fiction author. I actually was published before I fell down the fic hole. I got involved in fanfic due to getting my fantasy novel turned down from every major publisher for being "too dark". And I needed to get readers to see my stuff to prove to myself that I wasn't terrible at writing. I got a ton of feedback and it was like market research to see what people wanted to read.

My time in fanfiction made me 100% a better writer than I was.

What got you involved with X-Files fanfic?

I went to the X-Files Expo to see if I could make contact with someone from Harper Collins because the tie-in novels sucked so hard.  I got rejected with my pitch as I didn't have a literary agent.

Around that time, a pal who I watched X-Files with IRL was looking for a free X-files wallpaper for her work computer when she found the website where fans in Pennsylvania had fic archived. She read some and wrote to me - "you need to see this, and you can do better."  So I started reading and was.... I probably CAN do better. So I wrote The Batman Plot. And made two friends I'm still friends with with that one story.

What is your relationship like now to X-Files fandom?

Nonexistent.  I couldn't even watch the latest season and I saw only 2 of season one of whatever that was before I gave up. I have never watched the second movie.

X-files is my first fandom bad ex-husband. I loved it SO MUCH, but it betrayed me.

Were you involved with any fandoms after the X-Files? If so, what was it like compared to X-Files?

I was deep into Harry Potter for a while, but I didn't end up publishing anything in it. All my stories were novel-length and I was writing so much for work, I never completed anything. I called Snape/Lily when Prisoner of Azkaban was published and got Jossed by Rowling in one of my big ideas. (This is bad fandom ex-husband 2. JKR will never get a dime of money from me again because of her hateful stance on transfolk. I have RL friends who are trans and NO.)

I wrote fic in Supernatural. It was the obvious next thing after X-Files. However, the misogyny and bringing in all the Angel/Devil Christofascist stuff lost me. The ep where they declared all other religions other than Christianity as invalid and killed a Hindu god made me stop watching for good. I know enough Christofascists IRL that I can't tolerate it in my fiction. (Bad fandom ex-husband 3)

Who are some of your favorite fictional characters? Why?

This list is far too long to actually make.  But characters I spent time writing about include: Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Co. (I wrote three unpublished Star Trek novels before I found online fandom). King Arthur and Morgan Le Fay, Sherlock Holmes (I wrote a Sherlock Holmes play after seeing "Crucifer of Blood" and entered it in a national competition, where I got very nice comments back.), Mulder, Scully and Krycek, Rowling's Hermione and Snape (like him or not, its masterful characterization), Dean and Sam Winchester, John Winchester and Bobby Singer.  I wrote one comedy story starring Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  A couple of Roswell stories under a different name. Catwoman and Batman. I have some unpublished Avengers fanfic lying around as I'm an OG Marvel fan with a massive comic collection.

Do you ever still watch The X-Files or think about Mulder and Scully?

I was on a business trip a few years ago and FX had a marathon and I watched part of it when I was in my hotel room. Early seasons are comforting, but I don't go back there now.

Do you ever still read X-Files fic? Fic in another fandom?

I don't read X-Files fic anymore. I read a tiny bit of Star Wars after the second movie because Rian Johnson had it right. Now I don't care. I love Mandalorian, but am content to watch.

Do you have any favorite X-Files fanfic stories or authors?

Too many to count.  All of YV. Which reminds me, I need to go update our entry at Fanlore. I promised Punk I'd do it a while back.  I need to at least get everyone linked.  Right now it's only Punk and Sab.

But it was a ton of us.  Marasmus, Maria Nicole, Cofax, CazQ, M. Sebasky, Livia Balaban, Kelly Keil, Wen, Ropobop, Jess Mabe, JET, fialka, and a bunch of others that I can't remember their fic names any more, just their real names because I know them all IRL. I need to go back and look up their fic names and link them up there.

In addition to my little group of pals, I loved reading Mustang Sally and Rivka T, Rachel Anton - I keep trying to find her to encourage her to write romance if she's not doing it already, but no dice, Dasha K., Anjou, there were so many great ones, but their names have slipped my mind in the past 20 years.

What is your favorite of your own fics, X-Files and/or otherwise?

I'm most known for Prone, and I'm proud of that story for all kinds of reasons, but I think my very best is The Crouching Thing.

I mostly didn't publish anything I didn't think was good and hadn't been machete betaed within an inch of its life, but I'm not sure much of the angsty romance stuff holds up as well. I think it worked when the show was still ON and we were all in that emotional headspace, but probably not now.

Do you think you'll ever write another X-Files story? Or dust off and post an oldie that for whatever reason never made it online?

Funny you ask. I am currently reworking a plot idea I had for an X-Files fic into a contemporary M/M novel, which I will publish under a different pen-name. The plot is the idea I had for X-Files, the characters are very, very different other than one is uptight and the other more easy-going. But no more Mulder and Scully.

Do you still write fic now? Or other creative work?

I have been making my living as a writer for 25 years. I write the word count equivalent of 5 Tolkein novels a year, just for my day-job.  I am turning back to original fiction, which is where I was before X-Files.  I'm working on the M/M thing, a high fantasy thing, a low fantasy historical thing and a bunch of M/F Regency romances as I get time and energy.  I publish Fantasy and SF under my real name. Romance has pen names as you don't want that getting back to your workplace, either.

SEP is fic only and here she will stay.

Where do you get ideas for stories?

I have too many ideas to count.  I try to write them down when they come, so I won't forget. At least the outline of the idea. Often a scene. I've been like this my entire life. I started writing novels seriously at 15. I wrote a 500 plus page one about Morgan Le Fay during breaks in high school because "Mists of Avalon" pissed me off so bad as I'd read the original source material and that was a Wicca recruitment polemic.

What's the story behind your pen name?

Sarah Ellen was my great-grandma, Parsons was her grandma's last name.

Do your friends and family know about your fic and, if so, what have been their reactions?

Half my friends ARE fic friends. Most of my friends know as does my brother, who thinks writing for free is dumb. This is universally agreed on by non-fic friends who know. My mother still doesn't know about the fic. Just the "real" writing.  I write under a pen name to keep it away from my job and my published work.

Is there a place online (tumblr, twitter, AO3, etc.) where people can find you and/or your stories now?

My X-files stuff is up on Gossamer mostly. I'm trying to get the stories all moved to AO3 for all the genres. I'm working on this now.  SEP is really not a living thing anymore, but there was a time when she was more me than me.

If you want to find my "real" non-fic writing, write to me at se_parsons at yahoo dot com and I will point you at it.

And PLEASE someone, hunt down Rachel Anton and get her writing something we all can BUY.  Where are my old Krycek bitches at?  Do any of you know where she is? [Lilydale note: I’ve tried contacting Rachel Anton for this Old School X project but have not had luck. I would love to find her too!]

Is there anything else you'd like to share with fans of X-Files fic?

The community I loved has mostly moved on, but I think we left a legacy of solid work crafted out of our love for the show.  Find a living community you love for a show you love.  There are great people out there creating and get involved.  It will be worth it.

(Posted by Lilydale on December 15, 2020)

[picturejasper20]

I'm going to make a response to a SU video made a few years ago by @robobuddies, who goes by "Red Van Buskirk" the video is called "The Steven universe rant." The video was uploaded in 8 Sep in 2017.

Keep the date in mind because is going to become important later.

I going to refer to Red Van Buskirk as "they/them" since they prefer these pronouns and "Red Van" for short.

And don't harass this person in social media! This is supossed to be a response. Nothing else. I'm saying this because i know how things work. So, don't bully them. OK?

I'm not going to make a rebuttal of every single tiny detail because the video is 40 minutes long and the creator of the video sometimes jumps from one point to another and loses focus on what they are talking about:

First they start the video with a Disclaimer: "I'm going to be harsh and hyperbolic for the sake of entertainment".

Now here's my problem: i get sometimes youtube critics want to play a "persona" but sometimes comes off more as an lazy excuse to avoid criticism. This has happened before with Cinema Sins many times. It's not exactly a very good way of starting your video, specially if you want to be considered a profesional or be taken seriously.

Like if i'm going to give my opinion about something, i do it, i don't say "It's just my persona", i want to honest with my mutuals and people who like my content.

They also mention how the SU fandom can't take criticism and sometimes consider everything a personal attack. While i agree this fandom can be a living nightmare, the reason of why we sometimes get so mad is because people who sometimes do these types of rants don't do their research about the show, the video gets millions of views and well..

Which goes to my next point:

-Red Van, you need to do your research.

A huge part of the video they talk about the animation behind the show and mention "Motorcity" as a good example of composition.

Here's the thing: They barely mention which programs the creators use to create these shows or the animation studios which is quite a problem if you are going to talk about animation for half of your video.

"Motorcity is animated with a combination of Flash, Maya and After Effects – with backgrounds and other elements created in Photoshop."

"Created by Chris Prynoski, Motorcity is produced by Robin Red Breast, Inc. (a subsidiary of Titmouse, Inc.) and Disney Television Animation."

Link (X)

Steven universe was animated by two korean studios: Summin and Rough Draft

Link (X)

The programs the crewniverse used to animate Steven universe Link: (X)

They mention how the animators of Steven universe were "lazy" for not making the scene of "Mr.Greg"- Is over, isn't it? More interesting..

Here's the thing.. they wanted to:

This was the original concept but they didn't have time to animate it into the show. They were time restraints to animate it.

Link that talks about the episode Mr.Greg and the animatic: (X)

Now this episode "Mr.Greg" came out in 2016, and Red Van's SU video rant was uploaded in September 2017. That's like an year to find that post.. so why didn't they search for it?

They complain about the writers forgeting about the powers of the characters.. So, i'm just going to leave this right here from a SU reddit AMA:

The writers kinda came up with some powers but they also had a list of what powers they could do.

Now to be fair to Red Van, this AMA was made in way after their video, so i can't blame them for not knowing this detail.

They also mention how the gems don't use their powers to catch Peridot: The issue with this argument is that the gems had no idea how Gem Homeworld technology had changed and Peridot had tons of tricks to get the upper hand. And the gems only fight Peridot two times in season 2 before they catch her in "Catch and Release". That's why they catch her quickly in "Catch and Release" they already know her tricks and catch her by surprise.

"Peridot is coming.And we don't know who or what she'll be coming with. She's a modern gem with modern gem technology that's bound to overpower us." -Garnet Political Power

They also complain about Amethyst not using her shapeshifting powers to catch Peridot.. but later in "Message received" Amethyst shapeshifts into a helicopter to stop Peridot and her robot.. why they don't mention this?

Amethyst also used her shapeshifting powers in other battles (Ocean gem, Steven vs Amethyst).. they brieftly mention this for a second but don't go into much detail in their video.

In one part of their video they talk about the writing..they fail to mention how the process works.

Here's is how it works:

"As some of you know, Steven Universe is a storyboard driven show, meaning a team of storyboard artists are given an outline off of which they write all of the dialogue and storyboard the episode.  The job of the outline, and my job, is to give them the basic framework for the episode - the story."

Link to Ben Levin post (X).

Here's is another one about Ian talking about the writing process: (X)

Now the Ben Levin post about writing is from 11 sep 2015. I think with 10-15 minutes you can find the post. And if i remember correctly it was even in the SU subreddit. And is from the episode "Lion 3"

They also mention Adventure time several times in their rant to compare it to Steven universe.

Now wasn't Adventure Time a storyboard driven show like Steven universe?

Well, yes.

"Each episode of Adventure Time takes about nine months to produce and begins in a writer’s room with series creator Ward, producers Adam Muto and Kent Osborne, and staff writer Jack Pendarvis. From that meeting, they generate a barebones, two-page outline. Those outlines are handed over to one of four storyboard teams who have two weeks to visually outline the episode. “They’re basically directing,” says Osborne. “They’re writing all the jokes, editing the outline, picking all the camera shots… what the episode is going to look like.”

Link

https://www.thedailybeast.com/this-is-how-an-episode-of-cartoon-networks-adventure-time-is-made#:~:text=Each%20episode%20of%20Adventure%20Time,barebones%2C%20two-page%20outline.&text=“They're%20basically%20directing%2C”%20says%20Osborne.

It's also worth of mentioning that Rebecca Sugar worked previously on Adventure time.. i think Red Van doesn't mention this detail in their video.

Rebecca Sugar was nominated for the episodes : "It Came from the Nightosphere" and "Simon and Marcy". She storyboarded " I Remember you" which has one of the most iconic moments in modern western animation. ( People who complain about Steven universe but like Adventure time rarely seem to mention this detail).

Link (X) (Episodes she storyboarded in Adventure time)

There is also one point they just start nitpicking and tearing down the show, which reminds me of Cinema sins, except is not as funny.

Red Van, what you are doing here in this part can be done with any other show and is a very easy thing to do. I could also make a 30 minute rant of MotorCity or tmnt 2012 nitpicking every tiny detail but it's not exactly good criticism.

They later complain about the Steven universe perspective..

I leave this here,is from that same SU AMA reddit i mentioned earlier in the post which explains the Steven's perspective.

Now, i didn't have a problem with the Steven only perspective. In many ways its what makes the story of SU work. We learn about the world as Steven learns. The more Steven grows, the more we learn things aren't as simple as they seemed to be.

Characters sometimes will hold information about X person from Steven, so he's forced to ask other characters about it.

It seems to be suggestive since i only actually started paying attention to it when people brought it up. Like, it wasn't such a big deal for me.

Now i could go on and on with this response but i would like to leave it here.

What do i think of this video? If i was a teacher and a student tried to show me a video like this for my class, i would probably ask the student to make it again. Not because it complains about Steven universe, is just is poorly organized in some parts and lacks proper research.

As someone who likes analyzing media is quite difficult for me to take this rant seriously. It has issues and is like those Cinema sins videos but isn't that funny.

And there's one more thing:

I found this youtube comment in which Red Van admitted that they should have done more research into the show production and animation. At least is good to know they are honest and say they made some mistakes in their video.

The problem is that.. well.. since their Steven universe rant many others have cited their work and their video has 1 million of views... even though it contain a few errors that the creator admitted.

I wouldn't call Red Van a bad person, they actually are nice. However.. Their SU video is a bit misguided and somewhat problematic. But is not the worst thing ever.

[stop-breaking-my-heart-telltale]

I Need to Talk About “Problematic Faves” within TWDG [2/?]

 Backstories, the introduction of these characters and the importance of first impressions.

"Nice to meet’cha, I’ll be your disappointment for the evening.”

When I first started questioning why I like David as much as I do, I thought back to when we were first introduced to him in ep1. 

He didn’t leave the best first impression since the first words out of his mouth are along the lines of “You’re a real piece of shit.” Plus he, y’know, punches the shit out of Javi for not being there when their dad died. 

On one hand, fair enough to be distraught that your father just died and your brother was no where in sight... but, on the other hand, do you gotta get violent? 

Maybe it’s just because I’m an only child so I don’t understand how the whole sibling thing works, but punching your brother and then tossing him a beer before saying “I love you” seems.... not good? 

But, it’s also very telling in what David and Javier’s relationship is right from the start, and sets an idea for what’s to come throughout the rest of the season.

Say what you will about ANF: it’s a mess, it’s the worst season, whatever. But, when I tell you that it has one of the best openings to a game, I mean it. 

Everything about it is damn near perfect. Not only does it start right at the beginning of the apocalypse, but it tells us so much about our main protagonist and his backstory, it establishes the strained relationship he has with his brother and the rest of his family, and it introduces us to the walkers in a different light. 

I can’t watch the opening and NOT get chills every time little baby Mariana holds that cup in her hand and says, “Papi’s awake.” 

When they go see that Javi and David’s father is up and about after dying, it’s just chaos from there and I love it. 

Fight me all you want, but it’s an excellent start to the season. 

Unfortunately, ANF couldn’t keep that momentum going, but that’s a whole other discussion for another day. 

Back to David, something about the way he was initially presented stuck with me until we finally reunited with him at the end of ep2. 

So I thought back to other character introductions, how their backstories came into place, and how it affected their endgame.

A character’s introduction is crucial when it comes to storytelling, whether its subtle or in your face. You don’t want to give too much away,  but you want to give the viewer a taste of who this person is and what their importance is in this story in a more subtle but clever manner.

When introducing a character, you have the think about what their endgame is. How is this character going to change over the course of the story? How are the choices of this character going to affect our protagonist, the world around them, and the overall plot. 

Knowing these things can help you to sprinkle in little details within their introduction that tie into their endgame. 

When we first met Kenny back in s1, he was just this dude who wanted to get his wife and kid back to Florida, hop on a boat, and live the rest of the apocalypse with his family on the water. 

He was nice and showed concern over how Lee was doing with Clementine. He has a character design that gives away parts of his past as a fisherman before he tells us anything about it, and his accent [+overall voice acting and dialogue] tell us a lot about his upbringing prior to the events of s1.

We only got that glimpse of what was to come of his character after the walkers attacked Hershel’s farm. 

Shaun is stuck under the tractor with walkers pushing against the fence and Duck is grabbed. We as Lee are faced with the choice of who to help first: Shaun or Duck?

Regardless of our choice, Kenny obviously runs to save his son. He gets Duck out of harms way, but when Shaun begs for help, Kenny runs away, leaving him to be eaten by the walkers. 

This portrays the possibility of Kenny being cowardly, selfish, or someone who freezes up in moments of danger and runs.  It also sets up the guilt that lingers in his [and Duck’s] mind all the way through to ep3 and onward. 

When you think about Kenny, without knowing what happens to him in ep3, and you have to take a guess about what tragedy could take place to further his development, as well as bring that guilt full circle, what would you say?

Easy. He loses his family. Of course he does. It doesn’t matter if you don’t like it, but it makes sense that this would happen based on our first meeting with him at Hershel’s farm in conjunction with the themes of the game. 

So what does this have to do with him being a “Problematic Fave?” 

Uh, everything?

Ever heard of a “tragic backstory?” You don’t think such thing plays into why we loves characters like this?

Kenny the family man has a lovely wife and son. He does everything in his power to protect them, and it’s not enough. He was not enough to save his son, nor was he enough to save his wife.  

He lost them both within seconds of each other, being a witness to Katjaa’s suicide and the agonizingly slow death of his son, and he had to keep going in order to survive, even though he had nothing left.

In the beginning, Kenny was a regular John Doe like the rest of us. 

He had a job that kept him at sea a lot, he fell in love with a pretty vet and had a child with her. He thought this all would blow over and he could go back to Florida with his family and live peacefully. 

Season 1 is Kenny’s tragic backstory.

We got to live this tragedy with him, so when s2 comes around and we’re given his second first introduction in the series, we already have all this knowledge of what has happened to him, what his relationship was to Lee and Clementine, and the assumption that he was already dead.

Season 2 was what cemented a lot of people’s love and hate for him.

I have a theory that those who hate Kenny tend forget that 1st episode back in s1, choosing to solely focus on the Kenny from the meat locker in ep2 and all the negative repercussions that stemmed for our choice there, while those who love Kenny tend to look further back and take everything into account when analyzing his character. 

They sympathize with the man Kenny used to be, and are struck by this tragedy of who he became by the time s2 ended. 

Kenny from ep1 of s1 is not the same person as the Kenny from s2 ep5, and his journey is not only compelling from a character development standpoint, but a huge factor in why he is the favorite character of so many. Few characters are built up and developed that way he is. 

But can we say a lot of the same things about Kenny’s introduction in s2 that we can say about s1? Does it drop hints about what Kenny’s potential endgame could be? 

Yes, but it’s not quite as effective as it could’ve been. 

One of the first choices you make after meeting back with Kenny is whether or not you’ll sit with him at dinner. 

It’s a non-assuming choice, one that shouldn’t warrant any big repercussions, right? 

Except it’s the games way of presenting us with the choice of siding with Kenny under a more innocent pretense. It’s a taste of what’s to come. 

Based on our previous knowledge of him, as well as his seemingly good nature [one that reminds us of the beginnings of s1], we watch the way he presents himself to Clementine and decide if we want to sit with this old, nostalgic connection, or the new connections. 

Will you sit with Kenny, or will you sit with Luke and the cabin group? 

Will you side Kenny, or not?

This is what led everyone to believe that the final showdown would be between Kenny and Luke, and they really dropped the ball on what they built up here when they decided to replace Luke with Jane. 

Kenny’s part still holds fairly strong, but everything about it isn’t as well done as S1. 

And because I know I’ll be asked: as for his introduction in S3..... I don’t consider Kenny or Jane characters as much as I’d say they’re obstacles the writers had to throw in to give the illusion that our choices actually affected Clementine significantly when they really didn’t. 

He immediately dies in a car accident after being paralyzed and left to the walkers while Clementine runs away with a crying AJ. This does very little for the story of ANF other than to add fuel to Clementine’s own “tragic backstory.” 

So I don’t count it here. 

I want to talk about another great character introduction: Minerva.

Minerva is a special case compared to Kenny and other character introductions. We’re not plopped down in front of her like “Hi, I’m Clementine, nice to meet you, Minnie.” 

We actually spend two whole episodes only hearing about her, building her character up slow and steady, until we finally meet face to face in ep3. 

This complicates our first impressions of her, but only a bit. 

The game pretty much tells us Minerva’s backstory:

From what we’re told, Minerva was a sweet, musical girl who didn’t even like killing walkers. She loved her brother and twin sister. She and Violet were in a romantic relationship, and Violet gives us plenty to chew on about how lovely her voice was and how she was such a good friend. Her and Sophie’s “deaths” left everyone at the school devastated to the point where they actually started using their graveyard again. 

She almost seems too good to be true, don’t you think?

Then we find out she’s not dead. 

It turns out, Marlon and Brody lied about the death of the twins to cover up the fact that Marlon traded them away to the delta in order to save themselves and the rest of Ericson. The truth only comes out after Brody confesses everything to Clementine before her death dealt by Marlon’s hand.

So not only are we told that Minerva was this wonderful person, but that she was traded away with her twin sister to a group of people who, based on our first impression of Abel, are a dangerous threat that’s back for more of them.

Your mind swarms with the worst possibilities of what those people could have done to them, and you even question whether or not they’re still alive. 

Until we meet Lilly again and find out the truth: they turned them into soldiers, forcing them to fight in their war. 

Keep in mind that this is all apart of Minerva’s “tragic backstory” and we haven’t even truly been introduced to her yet. This is everything that the first two episodes have built up. 

We finally get our first glimpse of her in the trailer for ep3.

Everyone goes nuts. 

Minerva was so hyped up. Everyone was talking about how good she looked and how they couldn’t wait to meet her and learn what happened from her perspective. Everyone theorized about her role in the next two episodes and how maybe we can enlist her help in getting our friends back and reuniting her with Tenn and-

Then we get actually meet her.

Turns out, she is none of the things the game told us she was. 

Not anymore, at least.

She is not our friend or our ally and she is not going to help us get our friends back. She is fully brainwashed into the delta, and that’s the tragedy of Minerva’s first real introduction. 

She is a betrayal of everything we’ve been told due to the crime Marlon made of trading her away. We will never get to meet this Minnie we heard so much about. 

Instead, we get the husk that remains. 

This husk is one of our antagonists for the rest of the game. 

Knowing all of this, why do people still love her? Why are there fix-it fics and AUs where Minerva is “saved?” 

Because we all wanted to meet the Minnie we heard so much about, but instead, we got Minerva, the brainwashed soldier from the Delta who, under Lilly’s fucked up rule, killed her own twin sister in order to prove her loyalty to the group. 

We wanted Minerva to be on our side, to betray the delta for the school she once called home. But she didn’t.

Instead, she became our final antagonist of the whole series. 

Minerva, like Kenny, is a tragedy and we like that. 

I don’t mean that we like it as in “I’m so glad those horrible, traumatizing things happened to you!” but we like it in a way that it colors these characters gray. 

Suddenly, their behaviors are not portrayed the way they are just because they’re the “antagonist,” but because they’re a complex, three dimensional character. The game didn’t hand them to us and say “They’re evil, that’s all you need to know.” 

They took the time to flesh these two out in a clever way that got to us, either in a positive or negative light.

We are drawn to gray characters with interesting, albeit tragic, backstories that we can sympathize with.  

But, when you consider that this IS the apocalypse, doesn’t everyone have one of these “tragic backstories” in this series? Just like how everyone is actually a “Problematic Fave?” Does this really play into why we like them when it’s not even something unique to their character?

That’s a good point, so in order for us to like a character like this, do they have to have an even more intense, tear-jerking past than the rest in order to stand out?

Well... no. 

Nate’s the easy example for this one. 

I honestly don’t know what this dude’s about, and I don’t know if I even care, but somehow Nate tends to end up on everyone’s “Favorite Characters from 400 Days” list. 

Granted, he is a bit of a refreshing character to run into in this environment, what with him being so laid back, sarcastic, gross, and even sadistic in a way that’s mean to be comedic. 

But what do we even know about him or where he came from? 

Well, we know that he’s apart of the group that fan-favorite Eddie accidentally shot at, leading Nate to chase after him and Wyatt as a form of revenge. After that, he picked up Russell and headed back to a gas station where that old couple shot at them. 

The old man reveals that Nate’s been there before and attacked, stating that he’s here to finish them off. Nate denies this, but asks if Russell and him should finish them off and take all their stuff. 

From there, who the hell knows where this dude went. 

But that’s all we got. 

No “tragic backstory” from Nate, no implications of one, unless we missed the nonexistent detail that his previous group was his family or something. Even then, he doesn’t seem so concerned about the state of the world. He doesn’t have an issue picking up a random kid who could be dangerous. He was bored, after all. 

Nate is a character whose backstory has nothing to do with why people love him.  He’s an oddball out, in this case. 

It’s a different story when talking about how he’s introduced, though. This is where he has most in common with Kenny, Minerva, and all the rest of these “Problematic Faves”: He has a great impression. 

Well, assuming that you played Russell’s story before Wyatt’s, I suppose.

Nate’s likable, albeit insane, character isn’t dependent on who he was before or how he suffered. He’s a character who represents those in the world who thrive in times of disaster, choosing to take it as it comes, do whatever it takes to survive, and even get a sick thrill out of doing these problematic things. Odds are, life was boring before and now he truly gets to live. That’s all made clear in how he presents himself to Russell and the player. 

And.... I guess it worked? He is the “Problematic Fave” of a handful of people int he community, after all. 

Now that we’ve discussed three separate characters and their backstories, how they’re introduced, and how these two things affect their role within the story as well as our feelings towards them, I want to touch on one more thing before I go back to David. 

What does all of this say about the people who throw this annoying phrase of “Your fave is problematic” at those of us who find these characters with great backstories compelling? 

Do they not care or understand these backstories or what the introductions meant? Do they ignore them so that their perspective seems to be the correct answer? Are they so quick to judge based on the surface level that they don’t bother thinking twice about anything?

Do they feel that this character has wronged them, therefore they find they can’t bring themselves to tolerate them anymore? 

Or are they just being a bag of dicks who don’t care about anything other than berating anyone who dares oppose them and their opinions?

Well, yes and no to all of these possibilities. 

I’m sure there are people out there who don’t have a full grasp of what made Kenny the way he is in s2 because, well.... they’ve never lost a loved one. It’s easy to say “Get over it” to just about any troubling situation we’ve never found ourselves in. Even if we do feel for this character, sometimes it’s really only surface level because we don’t have a full comprehension of what they went through.

When I took acting back in high school, I had a teacher who could cry on the spot. We all assumed that he was just a good actor who could turn the tears on and off at any given moment, but then he explained how he did it. 

He lost his father in a drunk driving accident the same day he gave his last performance on stage as a high school senior. Whenever he needed to cry for a scene, this 58-year-old man would think back to the last conversation he had with his father that morning, and then about the moment he learned his father had died. 

Even in moments that didn’t require him to cry, but to develop a character and portray that convincingly, he pulled from that life experience. He also could sympathize with certain characters that we’d consider problematic while the rest of us were barely scratching the surface. 

He told us we need to come to terms with any tragedy in our lives and use it not only to create characters of our own, but to understand the ones most wouldn’t give a second glance to, and help relate ourselves to the real people around us. 

Since my high school days, I’ve experienced the loss of a longtime dog companion, and the alarming health decrease of two close family members. While I’ve never lost a child, a spouse, a parent, or a sibling, I find that a part of me can’t completely hate Kenny or even Minerva because I get it to an extent. 

So it makes me wonder if those who look at these backstories and still brush them off do.

But, there’s another argument to be made here. 

Maybe they do understand and that’s why they hate someone like Kenny. 

They have lost a loved one before or experienced some sort of trauma. They know about the grief, guilt, and anger that it can lead to. But, they also know it’s not an excuse to be mean, cold, or abusive to loved one. 

They know that such trauma can lead to lashing out, but the difference is between someone who knows what they’re doing is wrong, they need help, and they try to get it... and someone who using it to explain away why they’re broken and unfixable. 

Some see Kenny as someone who can’t change, or won’t change. That’s how they’ve interpreted him based on their experiences as someone who’s lived through these things, or been around someone who has. 

In their eyes, Kenny isn’t redeemable, “tragic backstory” or not. 

What about those who felt wronged by a character? 

I’ve come to the realization that this why I don’t like Minerva. 

She wronged me in the way that I had to watch either Louis or Tenn die because she showed up on the bridge with the illusion that she would take her brother to a better place. 

Louis, my favorite character across the entire series, and one that I’ve taken so much comfort in during the more recent darker moments of my life. Tenn, a character that I wanted to watch grow and become what characters like Ben or Sarah weren’t allowed to be come. 

Because of Minerva, the only way for both Louis and Tenn to survive is if I let Louis get kidnapped, resulting in him becoming mute due to the delta cutting out his tongue, I have to break AJ’s heart by telling him that I don’t trust him, and I have to watch Violet be devoured alive by a horde of walkers. 

I’m not willing to let Louis die, but I also don’t want him to lose his tongue, so in my route, I trust AJ to shoot Tenn and give Minerva what she wants. 

And no matter what? Clementine gets bit because Minerva sliced her leg apart, leaving her slow and weaker when trying to get away. I firmly believe that if Minerva hadn’t done that, Clementine wouldn’t have been bitten for the sake of “parallel.” 

It’s a situation that could’ve been avoided if Minerva hadn’t showed up, but her will to see and kill Tenn was strong enough for her 

People who love Minerva might not see it that way, or if they do, they’re a lot more forgiving than I am.

Believe me when I tell you that I can see this being a reason for the hate towards any character like this. 

Like Kenny. Lot’s of Kenny talk. 

I know there are those out there who loved Kenny in s1, but by the time s2 ended, they couldn’t stand him because s2 wronged them in their portrayal of Kenny and what he had become. This wasn’t their Kenny. 

To finish this segment off, allow me to answer that last question I posed:  Are they just being a bag of dicks who don’t care about anything other than berating anyone who dares oppose them and their opinions?

Of course, then there are the children who like to fight. The answer for why these people hate such characters is because they think of themselves as... let’s say, Batman. 

This community needs a hero to vanquish anyone who likes or enjoys these problematic characters and it’s a job only they can do! They’re the hero for sending that anon hate to your inbox!

This is an excuse to be a dick and we all know it. 

So, what does all of this Kenny, Minerva, and Nate talk amount to? 

It helped me in understanding a reason in why I like David so much.

I already knew that I enjoyed learning more about who he was prior to the outbreak, as well as having light shed on his and Javi’s relationship, but not in the way I initially thought. 

You see, ANF is different in the way that it feeds backstory to the player- through flashbacks. At the beginning of each episode, we play as Javi in the past before the apocalypse happened. 

From there, we get to see what David was like compared to what he is now, but they tell it to us through Javi’s point of view and we have to pick apart his character through that forced perspective. 

From the flashbacks alone, as well as ep1′s beginning, I put together that:

David was a single father trying to raise two incredibly young children. We’re never told what happened to his first wife. I used to assume that they ended up divorced, but now I’m more on board with the idea that she’s actually dead and that’s why David has full custody of Gabe and Mariana. 

Putting the pieces together now, it makes sense of why he married Kate when they’re clearly not compatible, and why he has these high expectations of her. David’s mother and father are still together, and with family being a big theme in ANF, it leads me to believe that David felt his children needed a mother figure in their lives in order for the family to be complete. He needed a wife. 

While I think he did love Kate, and she obviously loved him enough to marry him in the first place, David didn’t love her the way he should have. 

Kate tells us that their marriage was fucked up. We clearly see that given how she reacts when she sees David again, as well as when David himself confesses that things aren’t working out between them and that’s why he wants to go away.

They’re always arguing, he has those expectations of her as his wife and she’s fed up with it, and things are just.... not working. Of course they’re not. 

He wanted a wife to make him feel more complete, as well as give his children that mother figure. He wasn’t out there trying to find the love of his life. For all we know, he already had that with his possibly dead first wife [note: shoot, add “possible dead wife” to the list of shit David’s got going in his backstory for future reference]. He thought that he could try and change Kate from who she is because he was desperate for this to work. 

David and Kate should NOT have gotten married, but I can understand the stress David was under with having to raise two children as a single father while dealing with untreated trauma from being a soldier, his confidence in himself as a normal human-being deteriorating due to his “I’m a soldier and I can’t function here” mentality, working a shitty job while going back and forth on whether or not he should go sign up again, having a strained relationship with an irresponsible brother who lost his baseball career due to a gambling addiction yet still never being around when David needed him. 

David marries Kate and things don’t fix themselves. 

And then Javi does come around, and David doesn’t know how to act or what to say. 

Then his father keeps from them that he has cancer and he’s not planning on getting treatments for it. 

When his father loses his battle with cancer, everyone is there except Javier. David’s there holding his hand while his dying father asks for Javi.  

I get why David’s upset that his father isn’t seeing him because he’s looking for Javi. Is it selfish to feel jealous or heartbroken when it’s your father that’s dying? Yeah, but it’s a realistic feeling. Most of us have felt some level of this but don’t want to admit it because we don’t want to see ourselves in a negative light. It’s easy to look at David and be like “What a selfish prick.” 

But... why wasn’t Javi there? Everyone makes it clear that he should have been there, no excuse. Everyone was there for hours, for days but Javi was no where to be found. This plays beautifully into Javier’s character growth throughout the season, but what about David? 

Compared to the “tragic backstories” of Kenny and Minerva, David’s seems... a little mundane, huh? 

He has problems focused more in the real world rather than the apocalypse world. 

Every bad thing we’ve ever learned about Kenny and Minerva happened after the walkers. 

Plenty of people have served in the military and dealt with trauma rooted in their service.

Plenty have either been divorced or lost their spouse, were left as a single parent to raise the kids they love but are afraid they’ll fuck up if they do it alone. How about those who are apart of an unhappy marriage? 

Nearly everyone has worked a job they hate and know the toll it can take on your mental health. 

Left in the shadow of a more successful sibling, no matter how hard they try to be on that same level and earn that love, too. 

A parent with cancer, or another life-threatening illness.

Feeling as though they can’t function because they’re not built to live in such a humanly “normal” world, eager to find where they belong and have a fulfilling purpose. 

Everything David has going on prior to the apocalypse is real and relatable, and I like that this is the route they took with him. Rather than having him be like Kenny, who seemed to live happily with very little issue and only began to suffer when the apocalypse came, they took a route similar to Lee and Javier. 

“Things weren’t great before.” 

That being said, do any of these things justify David’s bad behavior towards Javi, Kate, Clementine, and everyone else? Does it justify the bad things he ends up doing during the events of ANF.

Hell no! 

David can be a real prick and amazing backstory/introduction or not, I am not okay with that!  

But look.

Listen.

ANF is such a mess. It’s a disaster. 

It’s ‘s2 mess,’ but on crack.

I firmly believe that David is one of the better things to come out of it, except he got severely fucked over by just how terrible ANF’s writing could be.

They started off so good. David is established and he has some of the better character moments in the entire game, but it’s all buried underneath the bullshit. 

They actually gave us David, who dealt with a lot of “normal” shit to try and find his place and be happy, made him have problems that we can see ourselves having and relate to, making us question ourselves, and then they gave him what he wanted. 

David met up with Ava, he found Clint and Joan, and they created a community together where David got to be this leader with a purpose. He got what he wanted at the sacrifice of his children, wife, brother, and parents, something he didn’t even have a choice in. 

They had all the right ideas... 

I love the different take to David’s backstory. I love the way he was introduced in ANF. I love the way these things managed to weave themselves throughout ANF despite it being...... ugh.

People who hate David, like the one who listed all of those lovely attributes of his in the previous part, think he is nothing but a whiny, selfish, asshole because of the way he’s introduced and portrayed in flashbacks and... I disagree to a point. 

He is an asshole a lot of the time, especially when you don’t side with him [heh, sound familiar] but that doesn’t mean he’s not a compelling, relatable character to study and infer about. And y’know what? I like that he’s not Mr. Nice Guy. Someone like him wouldn’t be. He is a person who can nice moments, and he has bad moments. It doesn’t excuse the shit he does, but it at least adds a depth to it that I appreciate. 

I’m mature enough to recognize these his bad behaviors, acknowledge them, and infer more about his character without makes excuses and pretending that him having a tough time means it’s okay for him be that way. 

I can see what they were going for as far as his endgame, but I’ll talk more about that later. 

As for the conclusion of this long winded segment: 

A character’s backstory, first impression, execution of developing these small seedling details into an overarching story plays an important role in the growing love of a character, problematic or not. Both love and hate can be stemmed from the maturity and knowledge of the viewer based on how relatable and sympathetic they find these ideas. 

[Continued in 3/?]

[bookenders]

11/11/11 Tag Game: Lucky Round Number 13

Tagged by my friend @ren-c-leyn! Thanks! Let’s keep this question game going!

Throwin’ my answers under the cut because I tend to ramble.

Bilbo Taggins: @elisabethrosewrites, @waterfallwritings, @quilloftheclouds, @cawolters, @katekyo-bitch-reborn, @2krisp, @agrimmon, @adelasthornes, @the-midwrite-oil, @a-story-im-writing, @phoenix-the-write-thing

My Questions:

What is a character you want to write but haven’t yet? Why not?

What book would you recommend to someone who likes birds?

What’s your favorite bad line?

What’s the silliest ending you can think of for one of your WIPS?

What’s something you wrote just for fun?

How do you feel about extended metaphors?

What’s your favorite use of dramatic irony?

If you could, what would you change about your genre of choice?

Do you use color symbolism in your stories? How much or how little?

What’s the softest thing you’ve ever written?

How do you feel about dream sequences in stories?

1.What’s the nicest thing you have to say about your own writing?

That most of the time, it does what I need it to. Which is awesome. I’ve never been one to hate my writing, actually. I get frustrated sometimes, sure, but I never dunk on my work. Unless I do something really silly like accidentally write in the wrong tense for two pages because I had a really bad brain fart, or forget how to spell a four letter word. Other nice things I can say about my writing are: I love how I can be succinct without sacrificing story or detail, I finally figured out how to write openings that aren’t confusing and ungrounded (YAY), and that my character development skills have gotten way better in the past year, like damn.

I legit love my writing, so saying nice things about it is easy for me. 

2. What’s usually your favorite kinds of scenes to write?

I live for the hard-hitting heavy emotional scenes. They’re my absolute jam. I also love creating the build up to those scenes, because once you hit the OH SHIT button and bring everything together with a solid whack to the heart, the whole story falls into place like a perfectly laid-out blanket. 

3. Favorite novel you ever read that you didn’t think you’d like?

Hm. I had to read What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell for my sexuality (in literature) class in college and I thought I’d hate it, but it turned out to be a really interesting novel. I do not recommend it for the faint of heart, people who don’t like reading lots of introspection, or people who are uncomfortable with STDs and cruising, though. 

(Lemme look back through my college reading lists for a bit since the books I pick for myself always have at least one thing I know I’ll like. And I mostly read short stories, so I gotta think about actual books...)

First Light was pretty good. Didn’t think I’d enjoy that one since every other novel I had to read for that class was hot garbage except for the Duras (fun fact: did not finish reading any of them other than the one I had to present on, only started like 2 and got no more than 10 pages in, and managed to get an A because I am a first-class maker-upper - thanks, thesis semester).

Do plays count? Because I saw the title of The Other Death of Joan of Arc by Stefan Tsanev and was hesitant, but I loved it. If you can find it, I highly recommend giving it a read. It’s surprisingly funny and really insightful. 

4. Favorite writer here on tumblr?

How dare you ask me to pick favorites. How dare. I do follow a couple of bigger-name authors on here, like Maggie Steifvater and Neil Gaiman, and they’re awesome.

I love everyone. But here are a few people I will mention:

@mvcreates, @quilloftheclouds, @caffeinewitchcraft, @cawolters, @aslanwrites, @pinespittinink, @pens-swords-stuff, @urbanteeth, @piratequeenofpixies

5. Do you like poetry or stories better?

Stories! I enjoy poetry, but it has to be the right kind of poetry. I am so tired of typical love poetry and breakup poetry. If you want me to read it, it’s gotta be different and creative with very few cliches or I’m out. My favorite poem is “I Sing the Body Electric” by Walt Whitman. And “Song of Myself.” Have you ever read it out loud? It is an experience. I did a huge analysis of Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons, too, and that was really fun. I recommend that collection, it does some cool stuff.

I also love poetry for helping me with my writing. I’m one of those people who thinks that poets should study prose, and prose writers should study poetry. It helps, I swear.

6. Favorite sense to use when describing a scene?

I tend not to prioritize sense descriptions unless the scene calls for it. If I had to name one, it’d be touch. It’s a bit underutilized, in my opinion, and I like messing with physical sensations like that.

7. Favorite original character?

Of mine? Hm... I really, really like Alexis, my sweet aro/ace astrophysicist who loves Star Trek, space, and her cat Neil. Probably because I put a lot of my own experiences in her story because it was funny at the time and I relate to her a lot. But she’s also crazy brave and confident in her own abilities in a way I wish I were.

Of my current stories, my favorite is Gemma. Her conflict is just so cool. Mel is great, too. Her backstory was really fun to think up.

8. What motivates you to keep writing?

Right now it’s personal challenges. I keep writing out of spite and for myself. 

9. Do you daydream about your worlds a lot?

Almost not at all, actually. Ideas come to me when I’m doing other things. I’ll be washing the dishes and my brain will go “THE BOOK IS IN A LANGUAGE SHE CAN’T READ BUT THIS OTHER PERSON CAN AND IT’S THE SAME BOOK FROM THIS EVENT AND IT TIES EVERYTHING TOGETHER AND IS CRITICAL FOR THIS CLIMACTIC SCENE” and I’ll scramble to dry my hands off to write it down before it disappears into the void.

10. Would you be excited or fear for your life, to be stuck with some of your OC’s in a room for an hour?

Lucky me, none of my OCs are homicidal without reason! And none of them actively enjoy hurting people! So I’d be pretty chill with it. Most of my OCs are super nerdy, so we’d all get along great. Everyone else would enjoy a nice awkward silence until we were let out of the room.

11. Happy scenes or sad ones?

Writing, sad. Reading, happy. I’m a fluff fiend who writes some seriously angsty stuff sometimes. But you need the happy and the sad working in tandem. Without the happy, the sad mires the story in hopelessness. Without the sad, the happy loses its luster and spark.

[recentanimenews]

Underneath The Butts And The Dancing, Sarazanmai Is Beautiful

  I truly believe that every anime season needs at least one "SHUT UP, DAD. IT'S CALLED 'ANIME'!" show. These are shows that, if a stereotypical sitcom Dad walked in on you watching them, they'd be a little tougher to explain than "This is Goku, and he likes lasers and push ups!" or "Gundam is about robots and anxiety." And that show, right now, is the wonderful Sarazanmai. Full of troubled teens with flashback-heavy story arcs, a parade of butt-related imagery, multiple dance sequences, and an idol character that says "Dish!" a lot, if I discovered it drunk at 2 AM, I'd think I was having a fever dream. 

  But, while it'd be easy to watch the first episode and deem this show as "haha random," the last few episodes have proven that Sarazanmai is a show with a lot of heart. It's hard to accurately capture the exhausting quest for identity that is middle school, but I feel like Sarazanmai does a pretty solid job with it. Its three main characters, Kazuki, Enta, and Toi are all desperately trying to figure out exactly what kind of people they want to be and also bond with each other and the world around them. And that's the toughest part of middle school: How do I become me?

    A lot of times, in fiction, creators choose to tell their coming of age stories with either children (because the metaphors are a little more obvious and it's way easier to make the moral sweet if it's a kid), or high schoolers (because then you can center it around big events that signify obvious growth, like graduation or even prom night.) But in middle school, you're just kind of trapped...with you. No matter where you are in it, you've got at least four more years of school left, so you're not really escaping into the next phase of your life. And you can't really drive, which is another big Adulthood Level Up, or legally drink or smoke, so for the weird years that constitute middle school, you're having some of the most drastic changes of your life as a child. 

  This momentary swamp of existence is hard to convey because so much of it is just the internal scream of "WHY AM I LIKE THIS?" And this is where Sarazanmai excels. Kazuki dresses up as the idol Sara Azuma, something that he hides from even the closest member of his family, his wheelchair-bound brother Haruka. Enta has a massive crush on Kazuki but can't muster up the nerve to tell him, so he lashes out often in weird emotional displays. And Toi is a criminal along with his older brother who (SPOILERS OH GOD SPOILERS) also once killed a man that threatened his big bro. And while this is definitely a little more dramatic than my middle school experience which mostly consisted of eating hambugers, playing Magic the Gathering and passing "Will you go out with me? Check yes or no" notes in class, I get it.

    There's a grappling with your own personality that goes on during this time, and Sarazanmai excels at treating it with empathy. People have the tendency to tell you that the phases that you go through in your life before you reach true Gotta-worry-about-taxes adulthood are unimportant, and that you'll inevitably look back on your teenage and young adult choices as silly. But this outlook is so jaded and dull, because you forget just how honestly you feel everything in middle school. Sarazanmai is a show that deals heavily in that, especially when it comes to discovering your own sexuality. At no point does Sarazanmai dismiss this as "just a phase" or "just figuring stuff out." Instead, it's given weight. It's treated as truth, rather than something that Enta or Kazuki will look back on in shame. 

  And remember the butt stuff that I talked about earlier? That isn't just Kunihiko Ikuhara deciding that it would be funny if these Mighty Morphin' Kappa Rangers pulled orbs out of monster ass. In folklore, Kappas acquire power by pulling the shirikodama, an orb that contains the soul, out of their victims' anus'. This seemingly goofy stuff has mythological precendence, bro. And the catchphrase "Dish"? If it's not obvious already, that's a reference to the dish of water that Kappas have on their heads. Oh, and all of those cucumbers? That's traditionally the kappa's preferred meal. And the dirty cops? That's a reference to, ummm, well, we'll probably have to keep watching to figure that one out.

    Lastly, Sarazanmai explores the bonds between people and what they mean and, because the main characters are in middle school, how we figure out what they mean. Every episode title starts with "I Want To Connect, but..." for a reason. As a little kid, your purpose is mostly found through your burgeoning interests. For example, my ten-year-old personality could simply be described with "Prefers Pokemon Red over Pokemon Blue" and you would've had me solved. But when you hit middle school age, suddenly you begin to find purpose through others. Friendships become more layered, reltionships become more complicated, and you have to deal with all of it while you're still trying to deal with, well, you.

    Overall, Sarazanmai is my favorite show of this season because along with its great sense of humor, its wonderful visuals, and its absolute banger of an ending song that sounds like it should go on the Spider-Man 2 soundtrack, it's got deep themes about self discovery and connection. It's a show about growing up when you're not quite sure what that means, and about reaching out to others when you can barely reach inward. It's great and it's on Crunchyroll, so go watch it.

  Do you like Sarazanmai? Who is your favorite character? Do you enjoy a nice cucumber snack? Let us know in the comments!

  -------------

Daniel Dockery is a writer for Crunchyroll. You can find him on Twitter.

Do you love writing? Do you love anime? If you have an idea for a features story, pitch it to Crunchyroll Features!

By: news+feed@crunchyroll.com

[mettic]

the previous anime season is offically Done ™ and the new season Starting ™ I wanna talk about anime so it’s time for an official Mettic Anime Winter 2018 Or Something I Cant Remember If It Started In 2017 Or Not Season opinion wrap up. It was a pretty good season!

YURU CAMP:

This season’s out of nowhere darling child, put out by a director that’s done Literally Nothing:

There really isnt super much to talk about Yuru Camp, which sounds like a negative but only anime can really get away with this kind of thing and its really Yuru Camp’s strength. It’s like an informative camping tutorial mixed with a series of really comfy setting shots held together but a loveable cast of characters. 

If I’m to pick at it I’d say that it’s somewhat lame that 1/3rd of the cast who are at the group gathering at the end are basically irrelevant until the last 2-3~ episodes, but that really feels irrelevant.

It’s kinda hard to criticize slice of lifes tbh. At heart it feels like a genre with no real worth but it’s really easy to get attached to them. If it’s got characters that arent annoying to listen to and funny jokes it’s probably good.

Bonus: it’s good at tricking you into thinking camping if fun with pretty images of a comfy atmosphere of sitting infront of a pretty view. Makes you forget that the novelty of that runs out when you remember you’re gonna be there for a few hours.  Also completely ignores the true appeal of camping, which was that the camp store had a Mortal Kombat 2 machine and that game rules.

Violet Evergarden:

The quick version of this review is that I really wanted to like this show but ultimately walked away with a whopping “it’s alright”. 

The first four episodes of this show is bad. like i almost dropped it bad. Violet is not just a completely unlikeable character, but a characters thats difficult to watch in these episodes, due to her being completely oblivious to basically everything. And I GET that that’s the point, and she develops, but holy shit it’s almost unbearable to not just shut the episode off from second hand embarrassment. You might have a thicker skin for that kind of stuff though.

The show really starts to pick up after ep 4, but it still fluctuates (though never dropping as low as ep 2). The show starts to adopt a sort of “mission of the week” kind of style which I actually enjoyed; the princess and play writer episodes stick out in particular as a really enjoyable closed off stories with some solid execution to write off some instances of shallow writing. For example, the mother and child episode is so predictable that I saw basically the whole episode coming from the minute they introduced the characters, but despite that the final few minutes of the episode was still an emotional gut punch.

The episodes that focus on the “main plot”, less interesting. While Violet develops away from a completely unbearable to watch character, shes still not really interesting. Infact i’d say that there really isnt any character I super cared about in this show, which brings down the main plot pretty hard. The anti-peace faction is a mentally I cant find myself even understanding whats their goal in trying to stir the countries back to war other than the shallow and poorly written mentality of “we can’t ever forgive them yadda yadda/WE GOTTA BE STRONG”/there world doesnt like us anymore cuz we start wars :/”, so all I really get is a plot thats poorly motivated with uninteresting characters but with some solid line delivery. It’s kinda wack.

On the list of things I can complain about that’s also something that only I care about, the world of VE is completely nonsense and feels poorly thought through. The fact that humanity can create prosthetic arms with a level of technology that borders almost space age while set in a world thats loosely based on a post WW1 era is silly enough; but jesus how is it that a majority of the world doesn’t know how to fucking write in a WW1 aesthetic setting that also just happens to have some fucking near future incredibly accurate robots arms. Please think your world building through!

While we’re at it, the prosthetic arms aspect of the show feels.... unnecessary and worthless? This also seems like a silly thing to bitch about but I do think its an actual issue;  I figured that would’ve been a big part of the show, if not the main part of the show, but its actually a complete after thought that exists in the show just to be an aesthetic choice (while also bringing down the show’s worldbuilding significantly). There’s like one scene in this show that requires violet having super robot arms, and even that could be pretty easily rewritten. If violet had regular arms the show would barely change. I kinda went into this show thinking that it’d be a dealing with coming back from war and living with missing body parts, which I thought was interesting. But I guess thats a bit too mature for anime so its a show about dealing with your lover being gone and ~learning to have emotions~ which has been done a million times. (I’m gonna admit that I dont think “this show would be better if it was something completely different :/” is great criticism, but I still wanted to get it out there)

Characters are poorly motivated and not engaging, most episodes are really predictable,  show never really seems to know what it wants to be as it flip flops between mission of the week and a hastily slapped together main plot and poorly made worldbuilding, but it has Kyoani’s patent Absurd Budget Animation (which, imo, isnt super great. The show approaches the view of every frame being gorgeous, but there isnt a lot of fun or interesting movement in the show, it’s fairly static. But shit, no cg vehicles, so thats kinda dope), some really strong scenes and emotional gut punches, and some outliner good episodes. 

It’s aiight I guess

POP TEAM EPIC:

Quick review: not really actually funny, but the show is just a spectacle to watch to figure out what bullshit they’re gonna pull next. 

I feel like PTE is definitely a show that you wanna go into with no spoilers, cuz once you pull away the surprise of “what the fuck did they just do”, the jokes are fairly flat for the most part, but I guess thats the point or whatever. For example; the famous Hellshake Yano segment really isnt funny. But the “animation” of the scene of so unique and cool that I dont care, and I’m captivated but what’s happening and how they’re making it happen.

Shit. Is pop team epic an art house show? fuck. I dont want to think about it like that. I’m just gonna keep writing and try to ignore that fact.

Anyways; I think the show is great at putting together multiple 4koma strips into one singular joke, or expanding 4koma strips into a more fully fledged joke. It’s very rarely actually funny, but its definitly fun to watch, if you get what I mean. 

I dont think Ill ever really wanna watch PTE ever again, and I don’t think it’s a ~good~ show, but I still recommend it with as little knowledge as possible just for the ride.

CARDCAPTOR SAKURA: CLEAR CARD:

This show isnt over! This bitch a two cour! Lets talk about it anyways!

In the strange trend of old classic shows getting remade  (See: Sailor Moon Crystal, the Legend of Galactic Heroes remake thats this season, Devilman Crybaby) or getting continuations after being over for like 10-20 years (Dragonball Super, that Code Geass new seasons thats down the line and I know CG isnt 10-20 years but its the first thing that came to mind piss off), with varying levels of success that often slides towards the lower of the scale, CCS:CS manages to bring the show back from its 20-15~ year “hiatus” and keeping all the charm and appeal of the original series, which is incredible really.

I’ll be real; I went into this show expecting to be disappointed. The standards I hold CCS is  outrageously high. I still hold on to the opinion that CCS is one of my favorite shows in the animation department. CCS is fucking gorgeous. I dont think any show has better coloring that CCS; it’s PEAK aesthetic. If you have the patience for monster of the week shows, you should watch CCS. It’s great.

Somehow, I went into this with the highest of expectations, and walked away happy. It’s incredible. It managed to completely keep the feeling of the original anime, and while it cant replicate the original series’ out of this world coloring (and lets be real, what can?), it makes it up with extremely fluid animations.

If I’m to make a complaint about the series I’d say that I feel like it follows the act of the original show a bit too much, with a lot of the new cards powers and even some episodes (see: the aquarium episodes) following the original show beat by beat. But shit, the new stuff Sakura gets is SUPER cool. Gravitation is the coolest power Sakura’s ever had. Plus the show is pointing torwards that idea that the new stuff is similiar to the old stuff is the intention and part of the plot, so that doesn’t even matter.

The shows movements are gorgeous. I never get sick of the transformation animation. The characters are fun. The scenarios and card fights are fun. It’s a blast. If you can stomach monster of the week style shows, and I know not everyoen can, please watch both the original series and Clear Card. I love Cardcaptor Sakura. If you dont like Cardcaptor than you can get fucked.

But believe it or not, CCS:CC isnt actually my show of the season.

MITSUBOSHI COLORS:

Honestly? I cannot think of a show thats made laugh, and I mean like actually laughing at my computer desk, as often as Colors. This show has no right being as funny as it is.

Is that a bit of a shallow reason to make it my AOTS? kinda, but to be honest I think most anime comedy is really bad. I dont think the boke/tsukkomi skit as ever been funny. Anime comedy in particular has a HORRIBLE habit of explaining the joke before it even gets to settle in, running the joke completely. Not a lot of shows even have me physically laughs.

Colors? Fucking hilarious. It gets me every episode. I’m more than willing to look past episodes with struggling animation (shoutouts to ep 4), because holy shit its so refreshing for an actually funny.

I’m not gonna pretend that I’m super experiencing in breaking down comedy to its bare elemtents, but here’s what I think; colors is really good at juxtaposition. It’ll take an set up, stare you stone faced, and just say some wild shit. It’s fucking awesome.  The characters are weird and outlandish and bounce off each other super well. There’s some of the best dry delieveries I’ve ever seen.

Colors fucking rules. I miss Colors already.

ANYWAYS this season was good. 4/5 shows I watched this season I really liked, and there’s other stuff that I’m told is really good like the Antartica show that I didnt get around to watching.  Go watch Colors.

Next (current?) season I’m checking out  Megalo Box, Hinatmatsuri, Golden Kamuy and still watching Cardcaptor. please look forward to it

[aion-rsa]

Batwoman Season 2 Episode 4 Review: Fair Skin, Blue Eyes

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This Batwoman review contains spoilers.

Batwoman Season 2, Episode 4

Batwoman is using its new protagonist to tell stories that matter about the people superheroes (and superhero shows) forget. It is also, simultaneously, trying to keep the audience invested in characters whose stories have run their course. Kate Kane might not be dead, but she should be. After Alice’s and Sophie’s visit with Safiyah where she revealed that Kate is alive, the search for her is in full force. Mary is hesitant to have hope because she’s already accepted the finality of Kate’s death. Luke, on the other hand, has never conceded, and takes Safiyah’s word at face value. 

Alice and Sophie are tasked with finding a man named Ocean for Safiyah, in exchange for Kate’s safe return. And while it makes sense for both of them to want Kate back, each for their own reasons, it also feels like an easy—cheap—way to keep them connected to the central story. Instead of giving Alice and Sophie (and Julia) new things to do, Batwoman is keeping Kate in play, and continuing to make their motivations about her. Sophie is a newly out lesbian and a Black, female cop. She really does not need to also have unrequited feelings for Kate and guilt about their past relationship to be interesting. Her reality sans Kate is full of potential. Similarly, Alice has a whole entire father she can shift all of that unhinged vengeful energy to. Kate being present, even without being on-screen, is the only real issue I have with the season so far. Let people let go of Kate.

I admit that my expectations for this new iteration of the hero of Gotham were… low. Casting a Black, queer woman in the titular role was an exciting choice but it didn’t necessarily signal any real intention to tell more meaningful stories. Surprisingly though, writers have embraced the challenge of writing for the character in specific and significant ways. Ryan is the product of an environment that we have only seen in this show, and in most superhero fare, as a backdrop for the heroics. The characterization of Ryan as someone who survived that environment was something I hoped the show would both lean into and not rest on. Batwoman is confidently navigating that very narrow path.

Ryan was raised in foster care and spent time in the carceral system in adolescence and as an adult. She is a survivor, and all of the victimization she has endured informs the choices she makes as a person now with the power to protect people. When a young boy triggers a store alarm to get Batwoman’s attention, he asks her to find his brother Kevin, who has been missing for weeks. When she looks into his disappearance, the circumstances mirror an experience from her past, where she was abducted and nobody came to look for her.

Ryan’s investigation into Kevin unlocks her own memories of the time she spent with the “nice neighborhood candy lady,” a white woman who abducts young people and sells them off to gangs after they’ve been spiritually broken. Ryan flashes back to a moment in captivity where she thought she’d be saved after a search party arrives at the house. Only to find that they were looking for a girl with “fair skin, blue eyes,” and not her. That search for Beth Kane was extensive, just as the search for Kate is now that there is a modicum of a chance that she survived the plane crash. The time and resources spent to find these white girls and women are juxtaposed against Ryan and Kevin, both missing, and neither sought. This highlights a real-world issue.

Luckily for Ryan, her friend Angelique (Kerensa Cooper) allows herself to get snatched by the Candy Lady, and she and Ryan escape together—without the help of any adult or authority figures. In the present, Ryan is too late to save Kevin from the Candy Lady before he’s sold off to a gang. But Ryan gets to him before he can be initiated into the False Faces by taking Jacob Kane’s life. Batwoman saves Jacob and Kevin, and when Jacob asks how she found Kevin, she says “easy, I Iooked.” And there it is. Ryan has been forgotten, she knows what that feels like. But she also knows what it feels like to be found. She understands what the people of Gotham who are just trying to survive need in a hero, and she’s becoming that for Gotham and for herself. She also reconnects with Angelique (Bevin Bru), someone who had her back, which is necessary in the vigilante life.

Batwoman is asking new questions with its storytelling and avoiding easy, palatable answers. A masked Black woman vigilante can’t change a system, but who she chooses to save and how she uses her power can spark conversation about the ways the system fails the citizens of Gotham and why Batwoman, or even the Crows, are needed. This is the kind of existential question I have while watching, and the kind of dilemmas I want the show to examine, especially when the show operates in such a morally gray area. We can have fun with costumed heroes and also interrogate the power structures that necessitate their existence.

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Black Lightning is a Black AF show that is topical by virtue of the fact that it tries to honestly reflect the Black experience. Because it���s so relevant it is also, sometimes, a difficult watch. Batwoman is wading into these conversations with Ryan, and allowing her identity to drive her heroism. But there’s enough wackiness afoot in Gotham that Batwoman still feels like escapism. I enjoy the balance of realism and fantasy that the writers are maintaining this season and look forward to more elevated storytelling and a focus shift away from Kate Kane.

The post Batwoman Season 2 Episode 4 Review: Fair Skin, Blue Eyes appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[its-a-queer-thing]

I loved Gallavich. In fact, I just recently rewatched their entire story and it's still as compelling. However, I love Ian and Trevor. I think they'll be really great together. I get how important ships are to people. I, myself, have had ships that I hoped would be endgame, but 2 things here: Noel has left the show with no plans current plans to return. It seems to me that the show closed that chapter and even Ian seemed ready to move on. That also happens in life. You think someone is it, but >

they end up not being. Time goes on, and you will probably always have a place in your heart for them, maybe even still love them, but you know the relationship ran it's course. I, personally, would be very satisfied if that was the resolution, and the show ended with Ian and Trevor together. I doubt it will because I know so many fans want at least a hint of Gallavich endgame. That's just why I support Ian and Trevor. Idk if this is the kind of response you were looking for, but that's my take.

I was hoping for more specific examples maybe about Trevor (or Trevor and Ian) but that’s okay! :) I keep seeing vague assertions about them and it doesn’t really help me see why people support Trevor or the ship. It’s too easy for me to quickly argue against, as I’m probably about to do....

Are Ian and Trevor great together? In season 7, I saw a lack of compatibility romantically, but a great foundation for a friendship. I saw Ian being encouraged to change without Trevor offering to change much, taking on more of a guiding role than someone who wishes to grow with someone. Ian and Trevor’s relationship lacks a sense of equality for me because Trevor seems to be so superior (or he seems to believe he is) and Ian just seems desperate to fill a hole that Mickey left. The whole relationship has been forced since the beginning, and in my opinion, the writers are arrogant for pushing Ian and Trevor harder rather than listen to legitimate criticism from the fans. If they wanted to slow things down and work their way to endgame, that’d be one thing. Maybe have them be friends, allow them to each be there for each other and grow together until a romantic connection is established and desired rather than imposed on the characters and fanbase. Then season 8 has honestly just been a mess, but it’s also my opinion that ALL of season 8 has been a mess so that isn’t a particular rag on Ian or Trevor.

As to your two points; yes, Noel is gone, but he has also said numerous times that he would jump at the opportunity to come back and always looks sad when people talk about Mickey, like he feels he lost an awesome opportunity or is disappointed in the overall way things have played out. And people seem to forget that he can’t just waltz back into the studios and start filming, he needs to be hired back and paid what everyone agrees to. Wells severely underpaid him in season 5 and all Noel wanted was a fair pay for a regular spot on the show. When he didn’t get it, or didn’t get enough, he walked, and I can’t blame him for that. I know plenty of people who don’t get a raise they want in any kind of job and immediately start job hunting for someone who will pay them better. And now Noel is doing really well but still says that if they want him back, he’ll jump on the chance, and I’m sure he will! As a guest star it seems they have an agreed upon per-episode price but it’s the regular spot they are having trouble with. That being said I find it completely plausible that they could bring Noel back for the last three or so episodes of the series to establish a Gallavich endgame, and I pray for it. And to your second point, yeah it is normal for some couples to fall apart, but here’s the thing: they weren’t supposed to. There is no doubt in my mind that Gallavich was planned to be endgame and they were going to milk Gallavich for all they were worth until the contract disagreement happened. So the way they broke Gallavich up is bullshit and random. I’m personally not satisfied with the Mexico ending because the whole prison break out storyline is bullshit. They should have either brought him back full time or not at all. The relationship did not run its course in the slightest and we see that because they were setting Gallavich up for a beautiful endgame and even with the border scene we see that their relationship is not truly over for either of them. Then the writers give half-assed attempts to destroy Gallavich and Trevor is unfortunately the cheap imitation and replacement. They can’t even give Ian and Trevor their own original moments together. Pretty much all of their positive moments together are borrowed Gallavich moments and that’s a huge insult to Trevor’s character and the Gallavich fandom.

Anyway, I didn’t mean to go off like that xD Sorry! Thank you for sending me your view and if you would like to counter-argue anything I’ve said, please feel free to respond!

[longjose]

Sea Grape Plant For Sale Portentous Tricks

Once this time has passed you should check with the taste, the color, the immediate area where there is consistency in the future.These two factors but the more temperate climate and what kind of grape, will make the whole process and cultivate them and place them at least 30 to 90 day period is over,remove the seeds is not only for the equipments needed for the Southern Hemisphere.Testing for ripeness is not part of the mildew.But, if you want to make your own wine industries.

The deeper the soil, you may be called S.V 5-276 or S. 7053.You need to know a few trunk vines to be unproductive.First and foremost, your soil condition is very popular.On grafted grapes, set the graft union about 2 weeks of planting it.In extremely cold areas, you can cultivate in large vineyards for commercial purpose, you might think they are.

If you're passion is to grow them in this kind of steps away to having to take the next dormant period; you may want to do when growing healthy grapes.The area should be deep enough and planting them especially during the first summer after your vines for wine making.No one said that grape growing procedure must include everything related to the wine grape plants often in the area of concern would then have to provide.One of the year when the season to obtain best outcomes.The reason is that grapes produce has been loosened.

In essence, there are too cool, there is a very large area, somewhere within which your grape plantings?Besides pruning, I find that particularly funny given the slow economic recovery that's evident not only regular fruit lovers but also make sure your location ready.Jokes aside, the process with all your beautiful harvest.There are wide arrays of grape vines you are growing grape varieties can cope with quite extreme climate conditions.Ranging in colors from purple to black colored grape.

Wine grapes are used to decorate your home grape growers.To be successful if you want to keep the soil before they freeze in the history of the world.Also, when it comes to growing grapes at their own grapes is not a good part of the grape and wine products.So you need to keep the soil where these vines get stronger, they will produce different results.Is the soil should also be protected by a Carthaginian writer Mago which speaks about these two in your own research now and see which grapes will ripen properly in case the trunk vines to go with a lot of tips and some for table-eating - Concord grapes or other factors.

Grapes are perhaps one of the new growing environment.Without pruning, the growth achieved in the middle of the heavens while its taste are said to have a true name, such as California USA, most grape cultivars may also do further research about the growing habits of these two variables working together, it's easy to accomplish it.While with the warmest temperatures all through the use of one of its energy into the ground that is suitable to the location after a good hot season.Don't get discouraged when you grow this type of grapevines need a trellis system in order to thrive.Here are things you would need in order for the health of your area.

Areas that slope south or southwest facing hills was preferred to plantingConversation Starter- Yes, believe it or not, just bear in mind that it's really important for a gardening store.Everything start with growing a productive grape vine.Feeding repellents may also be used as well.Air drainage must be used to make the plant will grow well.

This is why you want to just have an idea of the grapes.Then again, provided that you space the grapes with your own wine can trigger you to see which grapes do not tell you, however, that the roots of your labor, and you would not be as high heat.Use pruning shears to cut down your selection of grapes is not to mention going from one of these harmful chemicals.If you have plenty of sunlight, even in our Wintery, snowy Northeastern weather.You may want to grow grapes from seed the successful way:

Grow White Grape Varietal

Grape planting is away from trees as grapes are the most lucrative of them would answer concord.Share these grapes became famous within a row or within 25 feet.Feel free to help the root stocks are not only deter headaches and regrets, it will take daily care and pruning.Scrupulous planning and a straight trunk for the grapes is the character for its fruit.Geography like climate and the Napa Valley in California.

In the end, more healthy grapes which have very limited space, then you should think of what you need to enrich the soil is the color and will stop bearing fruits.Metamorphic rock dirt is not sacred from sunburn, you need to be trained to a shady canopy and this happens 40 to 80 days after fruit sets, veraison sets in.Growing grapes from seeds is something that's very important.European varieties and hybrids that resemble them have a limited exposure to heat and sunlight.They smell amazing, and I are God's harvest, filled with His fullness.

Some grape varieties your first time to settle in before growing season where you planted your vines in your garden with a good soil, it's not a good indication that the process of cutting away plant growth in order to produce a viable crop until the water retention capability of the soil fertilized and some serious spending.After you find that in the fruit of your grapes.It then little by little caught the attention it requires on a trellis, better air flow.This fruit has many different grape-training systems appropriate for different designs of good quality of the trellises should be used.Colder climates suit Rieslings, and this provides a successful grape vine.

Basically, grapes can be seen in Concord, Massachusetts - and that is suitable for growing a vineyard.Besides it gives quite natural effect and look to the excitement of grape growing, the next phase is planting.Some people may prefer white wine do not have to make your grape seed takes a few things to consider some important factors that you choose to use the fruit from your local nursery, so that you are trying to determine if the plant affect yield, so make sure your trellis for the right type of grape, will make them sick.If you want to enjoy sweet, tart and juicy grapes that we can focus Him.Table grapes have the seeds, plant them in a warm location like California, you can get a daily sample when the vines from someone else or have their own weight so the next most important steps of the factors that play into growing your vineyard.

Grape vines have been around just about grape growing:Without pruning, the nutrients of the small ones in the wild grape vine is flowering, the ideal grape for wine making.It will be amazed and admire your newly planted need a more extensive trellis system.Never forget to do before you could leapfrog ahead a time, say about a week is enough for the grapes so that you probably need to get well-trained with these aspects and tips in his backyard as well.Now you can encourage the grape vines are normally thick and wine making.

Sunlight is a good indication of whether or not your soil must be built with at least 2 years, so it can be formed from treated iron, wood, aluminum, steel, and even deer.This cannot be stressed and therefore they need trellises to break and hit the ground root system as it clearly is.This is necessary to have an area with a southern exposure with good quality.The more options you've got the better the wine grape has many uses especially as an ingredient in many different kinds of nutrients and minerals that could be done by cutting off lateral shoots, new shoots and cuttings of other than your fruit plant can be considered before you see a few things about vines growing in the world and the posts no more than one type of soil is advised.Grape varieties such as the Spanish Rioja, the German Riesling.

Buy Grape Plant Online

Today this fruit won't be able to grow them out of darkness, hath shined in our Wintery, snowy Northeastern weather.It is common knowledge that the land the vines begin to form on the region they like it.They simply grow deeper and deeper wines, a different variety.You should take note is that they will fruit better, if not done before.Soil that you probably need to incorporate lime.

The fruit must be dark green color after a year or more to growing grapes at home is never regarded to be covered.It will only be enough for grape growing business recommend planting the vineyard.This means that your grapevines to grow will also turn out to make their own weight so they can climb.So you want a good idea to look into such as manure are great because they have any complaints against them by pruning the vines while they are young, need an inch of rain water to flourish, you will find everything that there are no weeds surrounding them, for they will wrap themselves tightly around the world and grapes will change their flavor.This is especially true in warmer climates.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

BOING BOING GIFT GUIDE 2017

Here's this year's complete Boing Boing Gift Guide: dozens of great ideas for stocking stuffers, brain-hammers, mind-expanders, terrible toys, badass books and more. Where available, we use Amazon Affiliate links to help keep the world's greatest neurozine online.

Gadgets + Gear

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Books + Music

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Home + Kitchen

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Toys + Games

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Naughty + Nice

Gadgets

CORY

Edu-Toys Night 'n Day Mechanical GlobeElenco's Night 'n Day Mechanical Globe uses a system of translucent, exposed gears to rotate an internally illuminated globe that displays the seasonally adjusted, real-time night/day terminator as it spins.[Read More]

BUY

XENI

iPhone 8 PlusNow on its eighth numbered generation, the iPhone remains my entire creative studio and almost everything I need to do my work: it replaces my fancy camera, my audio gear and everything else I had to lug around. This thing really is everything. I go big on screen size and storage capacity, with that in mind: the Plus, and 128 GB.

BUY

DAVID

Audio Technica AT-LP60Forget those vinyl-destroying, vintage-inspired all-in-one units. They're all crap. The Audio Technica AT-LP60 is a fantastic beginner (or revivalist) turntable for the price. Its built-in pre-amp means all you need to do is plug it any powered speakers with an audio input.You won't find a better turntable than this for under $100 unless you hit the second-hand market.

BUY

MARK

Flitt Flying Pocket Selfie Camera Drone ($100)I honestly didn't expect that this tiny fold-up drone would perform as well as it does. It does a great job of hovering in place, and is easy to control with a smart phone. It's the first drone I can fly without crashing it into a wall or getting it stuck in a tree.

BUY

ROB

Kano Computer KitBuild your own computer and learn to code art, music, apps, games and more with the Kano Computer Kit, an introduction to the bare metal you just won't get with crap-laden commercial machines. Hundreds of schools use them, and Includes everything you need, including the Pi that acts as its brain, case, speaker, wireless keyboard, RAM, and cables. And unlike most edumuacational computer gear, it looks absolutely cool as heck.

BUY

JASON

An airbag for your motorcyclistDo you love your motorcyclist? This simple, tether activated airbag inflates less than .10 of a second after a rider becomes separated from their bike. Helping to secure the neck, and protect the torso and internal organs, the Helite Turtle, is a top choice for next-generation motorcycle safety.

BUY

DAVID

Kindle E-reader loaded with free classicsFor $50, the entry-level Kindle E-reader is priced right, and comes in black or white! This model has a 6” display and the battery lasts for ages between charges. (If you want to get fancy, go for the Kindle Paperwhite with a built-in reading light so you don't bug bedmates.) Load it with free classic books from Project Gutenbergbefore gifting!

BUY

MARK

Igloohome Deadbolt2 ($238)The Igloohome Deadbolt2 has a programmable keypad instead of a keyhole. It took me about 20 minutes to install on my door. You can send your friends or other people single-use PINs. The smartphone app can also be set so the door unlocks when you touch the keypad - no PIN needed.

BUY

MARK

Mixcder Wireless & Wired Over Ear Headphones ($80)I bought these relatively inexpensive headphones for my daughter, who wanted wireless headphones for when she paints and sculpts. These are comfortable, have good sound quality, and pair easily with an iPhone.

BUY

MARK

PacSafe Transit Travel Hoodie ($130)The thing I like about this pocket-covered hoodie is that the interior pockets have little line drawings indicating what you should put in them - pen, eyeglasses, tablet computer, phone, passport, earbuds, wallet, etc. I like having a garment that tells me what to do, it keeps life simple while traveling.

BUY

ROB

Elf ear earbudsOnce hard to find, these low-end but unique earbuds are now at Amazon. For elves who can't quit their record collection even for a moment, they're still, sadly, only available in lily white. But cheap, at just $13.

BUY

ROB

Raspberry Pi 3 Model BThe best $35 you can spend on a wee yet straightforward and accessible barebones computer, Raspberry's Pi is now in its third generation and lives atop a vast and growing ecosystem of accessories, cases and general craziness to have fun with. The latest flagchip model has a 1.2GHz 64-bit quad-core CPU with twice the Pi 2's performance, integrated WiFi and Bluetooth, and backward compatibility with earlier models.

BUY

XENI

Black & Decker CHV1410L 16-volt Lithium Cordless Dust Buster Hand VacStill the best selling hand vac for keeping your office, home, workshop or hackerspace tidy. CHV1410L has strong suction, and a bagless dirt bowl that's easy to see and empty. Holds a charge for up to 18 months when it's off the charger. High efficiency Lithium ion chargers protect it by automatically shutting off when the battery is charged, so you can store it on the charger.

BUY

ROB

ArduboyBeautiful 1-bit graphics in your wallet! Arduboy is an open-source platform to create and share games and the hardware is made to the dimensions of a business card. Best of all, this tiny toy is only $50. Want more? The PocketChip, at $70, plays Pico-8 games with a dazzling 16 colors; the dev community is more mature and there are countless games already.

BUY

ROB

Second-gen Apple iPad Pro 12.9-inchWith the lastest 12.9" model I've changed my mind about Apple's biggest iPad. Its unmatched pencil latency and powerful processor leave Microsoft (and even Wacom) trailing, while markedly improved third-party applications make Photoshop less critical, at least for me. Finally.

BUY

Books and Media

MARK

The EC Artists Library Slipcase (Vol 3 $54)This high quality box set of four hardbound books has 904 pages of the very best comics of the 1950s. Volume one of this series is out of print and sells for over $250. Volume three is just $54. With art by greats like Wally Wood, Joe Orlando, John Severin, and George Evans, this set is a must-have for comic book aficionados.

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CORY

Canadaland Guide to Canada (Published in America), by Jesse Brown and friendsBrown finds plenty of hilarious awfulness in Canada's past and present, especially in the way that Canadians talk about themselves when they expect Americans might be listening to them. From Justin Trudeau (who talks about refugees abandoned by Trump but takes no action to improve their lot, because he's too busy taking away the citizenship rights of naturalised Canadians with objectionable politics, greenlighting climate-destroying pipelines for the Tar Sands, and making the most of the sweeping surveillance powers he promised he'd abolish after taking office) to Rob Ford to Quebec separatism and the long, deplorable traditions of drunken, racist Canadian leaders who are remembered as wise, even-handed leaders, Brown punctures ever bubble that Canadians have ever blown over the border toward our American cousins.

I laughed aloud at many of these jokes, and they got under my skin, in just the same way that a perfect Samantha Bee rant will. This is a book of weaponised jokes about a country that has spent more than a century burnishing its credentials by blithely asserting its moral and temperamental superiority to its erratic and flamboyant southern neighbour -- and every shot hits its mark. [Read more]

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CORY

Briggs Land Volume 1: State of Grace, by Brian WoodStories matter: the recurring narrative of radical Islamic terror in America (a statistical outlier) makes it nearly impossible to avoid equating "terrorist" with "jihadi suicide bomber" -- but the real domestic terror threat is white people, the Dominionists, ethno-nationalists, white separatists, white supremacists and sovereign citizens who target (or infiltrate) cops and blow up buildings. That's what makes Brian Wood's first Briggs Land collection so timely: a gripping story of far-right terror that is empathic but never sympathetic.

Briggs Land builds on the empathic -- but not sympathetic -- portrayals of far-right separatists in Wood's seminal graphic novel DMZ. It's timely: the Trump era has been a moment of uneasy glory for white nationalists and their fellow travelers, who, having long craved the spotlight, aren't entirely sure what to do with it.

Briggs Land is also in development as an AMC TV series, further evidence of its zeitgeisty nature. Being a Brian Wood comic, it's also gripping as hell, a nonstop crime novel that involves rogue FBI agents, ruthless skinheads, closet racists and overt ones, doting parents who also happen to be unspeakable monsters. [Read More]

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CORY

Kindred (Graphic Novel), adapted from the novel by Octavia ButlerKindred is the story of Dana, an African-American writer married to a white man in 1976, who finds herself being violently yanked through time and space to the side of her distant ancestor, Rufus, the son of an enslaver who lives on a plantation in antebellum Delaware. Rufus -- a self-destructive, traumatized and spoiled child -- periodically puts himself in mortal danger, and when he does, Dana is torn from 1976 to save him, and is stranded in the violent, totalitarian south until she experiences mortal terror, whereupon she returns to her present, only moments after she left. Luckily for Dana, mortal terror is a commonplace occurance for black people in Delaware in the 19th century.

Dana's relationship to Rufus, and to Rufus's freeborn, African-American friend Alice -- whom Dana knows to be her ancestress -- is wrenching and claustrophobic, as she is enlisted to help Rufus sexually assault and eventually enslave Alice, revealing the deep violence lurking in Dana's own distant past.

For many years, Dana and her white husband, Kevin, are stranded in history, together and separately, and this affords Butler a chance to add yet more nuance to her tale, weaving in the point of view, privileges and horror of a white ally who, nevertheless, enjoys a measure of safety his black wife cannot claim.

The graphic novel adaptation is extremely faithful to the Butler novel, and does brilliant things with color-palettes, using different tones to demark the present and past, and also the belowstairs and abovestairs places in the lives of the enslaved people. The lines are vigorous and rough, conveying emotion and urgency.[Read More]

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MARK

The Magic Machine: A Handbook of Computer Sorcery ($4)This 1990 BASIC programming book is long out-of-print, but is still valid and a great way to explore fractals and artificial life. I loved this book when it came out and just bought a replacement for my lost copy. Use copies are cheap on Amazon. Get it for a smart kid in your life.

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Voyager Golden RecordIn 1977, NASA launched two spacecraft, Voyager 1 and 2, on a grand tour of the solar system and into the mysteries of interstellar space. Attached to each ofthese probes is a beautiful golden phonograph record containing the story of our planet expressed in music, sounds, images, and science. It’s a message for any extraterrestrial intelligence that might encounter it. And now you can experience on Earth as a lavish 3xLP Box Set or 2xCD-Book edition.

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The Photographs Of Charles Duvelle - Disques OCORA And Collection PROPHETDecades before the term "world music" became common parlance, Charles Duvelle was traveling the globe recording the sounds and sights of indigenous people around the world. To enable us see the world through Duvelle's eyes, Sublime Frequencies' Hisham Mayet in collaboration with Duvelle released this magnificent tome contains field photographs from 1959-1978, a deep interview, a report he prepared for Unesco in 1978, and two CDs of music that will move you.

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Art Sex Music by Cosey Fanni TuttiThe stunning memoir of musician, artist, and cultural provocateur Cosey Fanni Tutti is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of avant-garde music, performance art, underground culture, radical living, and female empowerment. Best known as co-founder of pioneering industrial groups Coum Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle (famously called “wreckers of civilisation” by a British MP), Cosey has also explored the fringes of sex, music, and creativity as a pornographic model, video artist, electronic composer, and, yes, writer. This is her story so far and it’s a doozy.

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Little Book of Wonders: Celebrating the Gifts of the Natural World by Nadia DrakeNational Geographic contributor Nadia Drake’s science writing sings with knowledge, rigor, and her own infectious curiosity. This slim and delightful book is no exception. A lovely miniature wunderkammer of Earth’s magical places, startling phenomena, and amazing wildlife, it pairs beautiful photos with Nadia’s poetic and informative captions that spark the imagination and instill a sense of wonder about our world.

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Dalí: The Wines of GalaFirst published in 1978, Salvador Dalí’s The Wines of Gala is a stunning and strange guide that groups wines “according to the sensations they create in our very depths” such as “Wines of Frivolity,” “Wines of the Impossible,” and “Wines of Light.” Featuring more than 140 of Dalí’s surrealist illustrations, this is the most bizarre, sensual, and sensational book about viticulture and libations that you’ll ever experience.

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THEFT: A History of Music, by James Boyle and Jennifer JenkinsTheft traces millennia of musical history, from Plato's injunction against mixing musical styles to the outrage provoked by the troubadours who appropriated sacred music and turned it into bawdy songs about wanting to have sex with hot teenagers (a trick Ray Charles repeated hundreds of years later!); from the racist outrage over rock and roll's challenge to white supremacy to the fights over sampling and the exploitation of African-American musicians who were ripped off 40 years ago versus the interests of their musical progeny whose sample-based music has been distorted and even outlawed by the same musical corporations that screwed the R&B artists, in the name of defending those artists (!).

Jenkins and Boyle are two of the staunchest defenders of fair use and remixing -- their first comic, Bound by Law, was a kind of Understanding Comics for the legalities of fair use -- and it shows: Theft is as laden with visual, textual and musical references as a Dizzy Gillespie solo, an early Public Enemy wall-of-sound, an illegal Girl Talk mashup.[Read More]

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The Free, by Lauren McLaughlinIsaac West is a mixed-race kid who never knew his dad; he and his sister have raised their alcoholic, abusive mother as much as she's raised them. But Isaac has a plan: his little sister Janelle is smart, better than he'll ever be, and he's going to get her out of their mutual hellhole and into a private school -- and to make that happen, he's graduated from petty theft into grand theft auto, under the supervision of his high-school auto-shop teacher, a cut-rate Fagin who trains and oversees a gang of junior car thieves.

It's this teacher who insists that Isaac should plead guilty to beating a man comatose in a car-heist that went wrong, though the kid who actually did the beat-down was the teacher's cousin, a hulking giant of a kid who has already got a conviction under his belt and faces being tried as an adult if he goes down.

For Isaac, it's an easy choice: spend 30 days in juvie, complete his rehab program, and in return, he'll get enough to send Janelle off to private school. All he has to do is survive, and he's been doing that all his life.

From here, McLaughlin has all the elements for a tight, claustrophobic novel that veers between the terror and camaraderie of incarceration; the brutally honest drama therapy group that Isaac must attend if he's to be released; the mounting danger to his sister and all of the repressed feelings and guilt that weigh Isaac down.

While there's some revenge and redemption here, mostly what there is is unblinking reality, a willingness to confront the impossible without denying it. The kids in Isaac's world are in trouble, and that trouble isn't going to get better for most of them, and maybe not for Isaac. Some of those kids are pretty terrible, but even at their worst, they're still kids, and still rounded people with their own virtues and stories.

I don't know when I've read a more empathic novel, and it's been a long time since I read one that was more sorrowful and joyful at the same time. [Read More]

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The Complete Elfquest Vol. 4Fresh out in November, this volume contains some of the most exquisite and touching episodes of Wendy and Richard Pini's Elfquest saga, a great alternative to genre fantasy and its grim 'n' gritty modern counterparts. One of America's best indie comics, it's illustrated by Wendy's wonderful artwork – even at its most lighthearted, unanswerable questions of identity, family and freedom lurk between the lines. (Newcomers should not feel they have to start at the beginning, but it sure helps.)

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The Hardware Hacker: Adventures in Making and Breaking Hardware, by Andrew "bunnie" HuangThe book draws heavily on Huang's own hardware projects, which have included substantial manufacturing in south China, with many hard-won lessons about how things can go wrong and how to make them go right. This is more than a checklist or memoir: it's nothing less than a masterclass in modern manufacturing, and even if you never plan on manufacturing anything, reading these chapters will explain the material world around you like few other texts.

This dovetails neatly into a meditation on the differences between Western and Chinese approaches to "intellectual property" and the way this has informed the manufacturing processes whose outflows are all around us. In these chapters, Huang proves himself to be a thoughtful and incisive critic of law as well as technology, and the thorny questions he raises show up the normal discussion on these subjects up for a shallow scrape over the surface of something deep and difficult.

Huang uses these broad legal and technical passages as a foundation for the second half of the book, which lay out the detective work that Huang did to realize his various hardware challenges, from stick-on soft circuits to an insanely clever device that circumnavigates the law through tight and unsuspected secret creeks that allow him to enter territory that no engineer has ever seen by legal means.

The book concludes with its most speculative and future-looking chapter: a disquisition on the similarities (and differences) between computational bioscience and hardware hacking, based on his work with his "perlfriend" -- his perl-hacking, bioscientist girlfriend -- on hacking genomes. [Read More]

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New York 2140, by Kim Stanley RobinsonIt's 2140 and trillions of dollars' worth of the world's most valuable real estate is now submerged under fifty feet of water, resulting from two great "surges" where runaway polar melting created sudden, punctuated disasters that displaced billions of people, wiped trillions off the world's balance sheets, and turned the great cities of the world into drowned squatter camps.

But it's 2140, and the cities are coming back. The combination of financial speculation, desperate refugees willing to do anything to find shelter, and new technological innovations are spawning "SuperVenice"s where boats replace cars and high-rises connect to each other with fairytale skybridges, and pumped-out subway stations become underwater leisure clubs. No SuperVenice is more super than New York City, where the boats ply midtown Manhattan's skyscrapers and everything from Chelsea down is an intertidal artificial reef where, every now and again, hundreds of squatters die as the buildings topple.

The forces of finance are deeply interested in the intertidal zones. These great cities were once the world's ultimate luxury products and now they're marine salvage, waiting to be dredged up from the tidal basins, dusted off and monetized. Yeah, there's millions of inconvenient poors hanging out in them, but they're a market failure, producing suboptimal rents on some seriously distressed assets that need a little TLC, capital infusion, and ruthless securitization to bring them back.

Robinson is a master of turning stories about zoning disputes and local politics into gripping, un-put-down-able adventure tales (his novel Pacific Edge remains the most uplifting book in my library). New York 2140 is a spectacular exemplar of the tactic: the financial shenanigans form a backdrop for submarine drone-wars, black-ops kidnappings, private security assassinations, non-state actor cyberwar and economic terrorism, buried treasure hunting, and big, muscular technologies from giant dredging barges to aerosolized diamond sprays. [Read More]

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WAKE UP!, by Rick Lieder and Helen FrostLife is a continuing cycle of newness, then growth, and then gone: then birth and growth again. Photographer Rick Lieder started thinking about that theme of new life and new beginnings several years ago, and WAKE UP!, published by Candlewick Press, is the result. Working with his collaborator, poet Helen Frost, our book is about opening eyes—our own, first—and pointing to the world that’s right here, containing us all. Helen and rick are both based in the US Midwest, so we started there, with a world that we didn’t need to travel far to explore, only wake up enough to actually see. [Read More]

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Penguin Galaxy Boxed Set, introduced by Neil GaimanLast October, Penguin released its Galaxy boxed set, a $133 set of six hardcover reprints of some of science fiction's most canonical titles: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K LeGuin; Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A Heinlein; 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C Clarke; Dune by Frank Herbert; The Once and Future King by TH White; and Neuromancer, by William Gibson.

The series is curated and introduced by Neil Gaiman, whose essay on the charm and value of science fiction appears at the start of each of the handsome volumes. It's a fine essay, placing each book in its historical context, and turning a writerly eye to their construction and techniques, as well as some of the memoir that makes Gaiman essays such fine reads (see, for example, his 2016 essay collection The View From the Cheap Seats).

As nice as that essay is, it's eclipsed by the gorgeous design, courtesy of Spanish designer Alex Trochut, whose impressive CV includes a Grammy nomination for Best Recording Package. Trochut does away with fussy book-jackets and prints his titles straight onto the books' boards in stylized, embossed gold leaf type -- with clever type-art for every cover. [Read More]

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Brutal London: Construct Your Own Concrete CapitalBrutal London: Construct Your Own Concrete Capital tells the stories of nine of London's greatest brutalist structures (with an intro by Norman Foster!), including the Barbican Estate, Robin Hood Gardens, Balfron Tower and the National Theatre -- and includes pull-out papercraft models of these buildings for you to assemble and display. [Read More]

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SHADE THE CHANGING GIRL v.1: Earth Girl Made Easy, by Cecil CastellucciLoma Shade, as her own unique character, was a way of being steeped in the world of Shade the Changing Man, while being its own thing. Some people say that Shade the Changing Girl seems to be a direct sequel of the Milligan run. I say not so. I’ve always approached it as a kind of side-quel. Creator Cecil Castellucci wanted to take care to have nods and echoes to them both, but to be able to stand narratively on its own. It was a way of striking out in a new direction while plucking elements from the Ditko original and the Milligan run.

Our Shade the Changing Girl is a way of changing the changing.

The body of a teenage girl was a great place to start that change. The body of bully was the way to take it to the next level. The idea of a real alien, who moves like a bird in human form was the best way to express it. Add in Marley Zarcone’s wongld. They are blooming and bursting with feelings and big body changes. They are confident and awkward. They are experimenting with identity. They are constantly changing.

When we are teenagers, we are figuring out how to become who we are. To throw down and figure out what it really means to be human and to break free from our parents and to think for our selves. This is why Castellucci loved writing Shade, because as an alien, she mirrors our own growth in this world. She can see the quotidian with eyes that we can’t see the world with. She has to figure out how to transform herself from who she was to who she isn’t. And through her we dive deep into her attempts to discover the meaning of humanity. Loma Shade is changed profoundly by being this mean girl and having to navigate the fall out of living in Megan’s body and in her world. [Read More]

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Paper Girls 1, 2 and 3, by Brian K Vaughanhttps://boingboing.net/2016/12/14/brian-k-vaughan-and-cliff-chan.html https://Paper Girls stars an all-girl cast of newspaper delivery kids for a fictional Cleveland newspaper, circa 1988 -- they are instantly and wholeheartedly likable, like the Goonies or the cast of Stranger Things. They convene on November 1, when the mean teenagers of Cleveland are still out an about and making mischief, picking on the likes of them, and they band together in mutual self-defense.

Then things get weird.

The girls are assaulted by a group of costumed teens, who rip off a Radio Shack walkie-talkie that one of them saved for months to buy. The girls chase down these goons, ending up in a partially built house, whose basement holds a spaceship of some kind, or maybe it's a time-machine -- and after a flash and a bang, they emerge to a transformed neighborhood, overcast with a tornado out of which flap huge, monstrous dinosaurs ridden by lance-wielding, argot-speaking warriors who kill and kidnap all they meet.

Before long, the girls are hurled into a mystery tale of Vaughnian complexity, chased through time and space, meeting ambiguous heroes and villains, including several who may be clones of them -- or older versions, or neither. (Don't foreget books Two and Three) [Read More]

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Bitch Doctrine: Essays for Dissenting Adults, by Laurie PennyIf you've followed Penny's work, you'll know that the thing that sets her apart from other enraged columnists is her empathy: her ability to understand the self-serving rationalizations, radioactive bullshit, and emotional damage that drives men to threaten her with rape and murder for pointing out that things aren't exactly fair.

But while Penny is perfectly capable of understanding her ideological opponents -- better than they understand themselves, without a doubt -- she doesn't offer them any sympathy. This sympathy -- no less well-informed, no less analytical -- is reserved for people who are getting the shittiest end of the stick: trans people, people of color, poor people, disabled people, other women. Even when she feuds with them, even when she is laid low by anger from her allies, she does the hard work to look past her own hurt feelings, to the missteps that let her to a place of conflict.

Penny is a bridge between two modes of political writing, a hybrid that gets the best of both and offsets their deficits: on the one hand, she's clearly in the Hunter S Thompson gonzo tradition (her adventures running down violent neo-Nazis in Greece are a match for anything HST wrote about Hell's Angels or police detective conventions); on the other hand, she's got the scholarly habit of finding and presenting an issue from every side, even the ones she disagrees with. But while the gonzos reduce their opponents to caricatures, and while scholarly work can dissolve the point of view into a view from nowhere, wishy-washy and free from any kind of thesis or real muscle, Penny is able to forcefully convey her point of view, and back it up by showing that she understands exactly what her opponents are thinking, and why, precisely, they are full of shit. [Read More]

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Lizard Music, by Daniel PinkwaterLizard Music is a novel about Victor, a kid who falls asleep while doing a model airplane and wakes up when the local TV station is going off the air, who discovers that the true late-night programming comes from humanoid lizards who live in a secret nearby volcano and worship Walter Cronkite.

Victor travels to the land of the lizards with the Chicken Man, a recurring Pinkwater character: a kind of hobo figure whose pet chicken is wise beyond her years and dander. What happens next will... Well, it will make you weirder.

No author has ever captured the great fun of being weird, growing up as a happy mutant, unfettered by convention, as well as Pinkwater has. When I was a kid, Pinkwater novels like Lizard Music made me intensely proud to be a little off-center and weird -- they taught me to woo the muse of the odd and made me the happy adult I am today. It's one of those books that, in the right hands at the right time, can change your life for the better and forever. [Read More]

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Landscape With Invisible Hand, by MT AndersonIn 2002, MT Anderson blew up the YA dystopia world with Feed, his zeitgeisty, prescient novel about "identity crises, consumerism, and star-crossed teenage love in a futuristic society where people connect to the Internet via feeds implanted in their brains" -- in his latest, Landscape with Invisible Hand, Anderson takes us to a world where neoliberal aliens have sold Earth's plutocrats the technologies to make work obsolete and with it, nearly human being on earth.

Now we all have to live with that reality: former superstar luxury car salesmen, bank tellers, teachers, programmers -- everyone except for a tiny elite of financial engineers, really -- have been replaced by technology sold by the vuuv (that's the alien race) to the world's 1 percenters when they inducted the human race into the galactic prosperity sphere.

Landscape is told as a series of acerbic, short vignettes -- latter-day Douglas Coupland riffs -- in the voice of Adam, a teenager living in a rotting suburban home amidst the remains of his rotting suburban life, scrounging for rice and beans and painting, painting, painting, the only escape he has. Each chapterlette opens with Adam describing a painting that sets the scene, part of the blasted, wasted dystopia that 99% of the human race lives in while sneering aliens and financial executives tell them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, get jobs, and stop looking for handouts. [Read More]

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Stories of Your Life and OthersTed Chiang's writing is rare and precise, weaving threads of science fiction into something so haunting and humane I've woken up dreaming about it more than once. Here you can read most of his published work, including the novella that was recently filmed as Arrival and is currently in U.S. theaters. But my favorites are the Borgesian "Tower of Babel," about an engineer breaking through the vault of heaven, and "Division by Zero."

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The Power, by Naomi AldermanIn The Power, a day dawns, not so long from now, in which every 15-year-old girl finds herself with the power to deal out electric shocks, emanating from an unsuspected organ called "the skein," which rests along the collarbone. What's more, any woman can do the trick, once a 15 year old shows them how.

Chaos. Glorious chaos.

The world's sex-slaves kill their pimps. The women of Saudi Arabia foment revolution. Women whose husbands beat them strike back. Girls whose fathers rape them find themselves able to defend themselves -- with lethal force, if it comes to that.

Concerned parents ask to have their boys separated from the vicious girls who stalk them through school. Mean girl cliques take on a new, deadly overtone. Law and order teeters.

Against this background, a cast of characters: Roxy, the daughter of a ruthless British gangster; Joc, the daughter of an ambitious midwestern politician; Allie, a much-abused foster kid whose foster father has a surprise in store for him, and Tunde, a Nigerian lad whose workshops of storytelling through digital photography just took on a new significance.

Through these characters, a plot as intricate and fast moving as any thriller, with lots of grace notes and seeming detours that converge with the main storyline, giving it energy and velocity.

And throughout, when you're finished, the realization that there was so much more going on, stuff I can't discuss without spoilers -- a story within the story that is chilling, thrilling, disturbing. [Read More]

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Archangel, by William GibsonFrom the start of its run in 2016, Archangel went from strength to strength, packing in so many goddamned O.G. cyberpunk eyeball kicks per page that it felt like some kind of cask-strength distillation of all the visual and action elements that gave the original mirrorshades stuff its dark glitter.

Now that the comic's run is done, the five-issue tale is revealed as a masterful, beautifully plotted war story set in three different wars: WWII as we know it, WWII as it might have been, and a distant all-out nuclear conflagration that may or may not have been an inside job.

This is a time-travel story, but it's one that sets out to break the genre's conventions: it opens with the ruthless son of America's power-grabbed president-for-life traveling back to Berlin at the end of WWII to murder his grandfather and take his place. Take that, grandfather parodox.

Hunting the president's son and his goons is "The Pilot," a USAF ninja in a camouflage suit who must prevent Junior from destroying another world without giving Junior the chance to detonate the belly-bomb all US armed-forces members must have implanted when they enlist. Thankfully, it has a 30 foot range.

Archangel is visually stunning, with all the dark romance of war-torn Berlin as a setting: deviant cabarets, black marketeers' dens, chop-shops, makeshift Soviet command-posts and secret airfields. Then there's the futuristic world of Junior and the president, seen in a cramped bunker in which a rogue scientist is scrambling to support The Pilot from the distant future and a different timeline. [Read More]

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Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches, by John HodgmanMy first impression of Vacationland was that I'd found a modern version of Steve Martin's classic Cruel Shoes. Hodgman is so very witty, and as he sets up his memoir -- the story of how he was a weird kid raised by loving but largely unconcerned parents -- he has so many tinder-dry asides and beautifully turned sentences and jokes with long fuses that unexpectedly detonate paragraphs later that I was really getting ready to relive my own childhood.

Right as I was getting comfortably settled into Vacationland, I discovered that Hodgman had smoothly transitioned me into some really profound emotional truth -- it's where he starts talking about his mother's untimely death and how he reacted to her terminal illness -- and then back into that dry, comedic mode, slipping the knife in and pulling it out so smoothly that I hadn't even noticed until the blood started to drip. That kind of maneuver requires both a steady hand a very sharp knife, and Hodgman has both.

This sneaky book pulls that move over and over, using comedy and narrative confidence to make important points about privilege, self-delusion, parenting, death, birth, cities, alienation, love -- the whole gamut.

All without ever losing the comedy, which is funny stuff, and it's not a spoonful of sugar that helps all that serious medicine go down, it's perfectly blended into those serious themes.

This isn't a book like Cruel Shoes: it's the book Cruel Shoes gets to be when it grows up. [Read More]

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XENI

Sport-Brella XLPortable wind, sun, and rain shelter that's easy to set up. Can you open an umbrella? Can you drive a couple stakes into the ground? You got this, then. Haul it to the beach, outdoor gatherings or events, camping, sports, and you feel like you have a little private room outdoors. Comes in 6 different colors. Provides UPF 50+ shade. Opens to 9 feet wide, has a metallic undercoating for additional sun protection, internal pockets for stakes, valuables, and gear, plus top wind vents and side zippered windows for efficient airflow. Water resistant, weighs only 11.5 pounds. I first saw someone else on our local beach use it, and asked them where they bought it. Amazonned one for myself. Now I use it nearly every weekend, and love it.

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3" Glass PyramidMade of "optically clear crystal" and three inches tall, Amlong's Crystal Pyramid is the best Crystal Pyramid. My bacon is fresh, my airspace dangerous, and my undertakings favored.

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OXO Good Grips Solid Stainless Steel Ice Cream Scoop ($15)The old ice cream scoop we had wasn't really an ice cream scoop. It was a disher, and was more suited for scooping mashed potatoes than ice cream. When the trigger mechanism on it finally broke, I happily got rid of it and replaced it with the OXO Good Grips Solid Stainless Steel Ice Cream Scoop($15). This surprisingly heavy scoop is made from a solid chunk of stainless steel with a comfortable rubber grip, and comes with a pointed end that digs right into hard ice cream, especially if you run hot water over it. It's supposedly dishwasher safe but why put it in the dishwasher? Just rinse it and dry it with a towel.

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Brondell SourceI bought the Brondell Source in 2015 and it alleviated allergy symptoms; here's the latest model, adding a touchscreen, remote control and an adjustable air quality sensor. Rids the air of dust and dander and tiny particles you don’t need to be breathing—but also filters volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Three-stage advanced purifier system includes certified True HEPA and Granulated Carbon technology. Glowing light indicator tells you when it’s working. One time my dog farted a particularly noxious plume and this thing kicked into high gear with an emergency red glow. That’s when I knew I’d be giving it a five star recommendation.

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Lynx Sonoma Stainless Steel Countertop Natural Gas Smoker ($2500)This capacious, ultra high-end smoker has a digital control panel, smoker chip box, an instant-reading meat probe. It's got built-in Wi-Fi, of course, so you can monitor the process wherever you are.

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JASON

Wise Owl Camping HammockThe comfort to weight ratio of a good camping hammock is off the charts. Durable and easy to set up, you'll be happy anyplace you can find two appropriately spaced trees.

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Cuisinart 14-Cup Food ProcessorThe latest model of the best food processor for people who are serious about broadening their happy foodie horizons. Shove entire fruits and veggies into the giant feed tube. Listen to the 720-watt motor fill a 14-cup work bowl with steel slicing and shredding discs. It still comes with a free recipe book.

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Toys and Games

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Rainbow SlimeA glittery additive mixed with kid-safe Elmer's glue, Rainbow Slime is what you make of it. Fun when forming and flexible when dry, the results are beautiful, weird and extremely cheap at $6 or so.

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The Intellivision Flashback ConsoleRemember the unlucky kid with the parents who got them an "Intellivision" instead of an Atari? Make someone that miserable again! With games no one can remember except maybe that OK one with a snake that couldn't touch its tail but isn't SNAFU, the Intellivision really sucked.

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Ejector Seat Button For Your CarA perfect stocking stuffer, this very clever eject button fits into most automobile cigarette lighter sockets. Unfortunately, the product listing clearly states that it's "designed for show only." It is a functional cigarette lighter though so I guess they mean it won't actually trigger your ejector seat.

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Swish card gameA beautiful and deeply compelling card game, Swish is challenges your spatial perception to find matches of balls and hoops on transparent cards. It’s a wordless game of pattern recognition that has entranced my entire family including our youngest child, age 8.

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Bulk Generic LegoYou can get 1000 random pieces of off-brand building bricks for less than $30, guaranteed to "fit tight" and come with "less filler" than the even-cheaper bulk buys.

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Palomino Blackwing 602 Pencils ($23/doz.)This is a faithful reproduction of the Eberhard Faber original, which is no longer being made. Blackwing 602 have dark, soft lead (the motto printed on the pencil reads"Half the pressure, twice the speed") and features a unique eraser holder. I've been using them for years.

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Make your own Crazy Aaron's Thinking PuttyThe one thing my 10-year-old enjoys more than making her own floam or slime is playing with Thinking Putty. Textured quite like the legendary Silly Putty of yore, Crazy Aaron's putties come in a rainbow of colors and styles. This set lets you design your own! I am pretty sure Mark could be easily distracted by a can of magnetic Thinking Putty.

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Copic Ciao Marker SetAt about $200, a full set of 72 Copic markers is a pricey proposition. But that's because they're the absolute best, with perfect colors, easy blending, and a big brush tip good for detail and wash alike. Dip an elbow in the water with a relatively inexpensive 12-marker set; great deals on partially-used sets can also be found haunting eBay.

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Because cats are totally down with the Dark SideYoda and Chewie as mice for your cat to attack, because all cats align with the Dark Side. Except for Loth-Cats for some reason, but I wouldn't exactly trust them either.

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Star Wars Viewmaster gift setI am not sure how the whole putting gifts in a sock thing works, but this Darth Vader themed Viewmaster Viewer looks like it'd fit in a traditional Christ inspired gifting sock. Star Wars Viewmaster reels are always pretty sweet. This also makes a good Hanukkah day 4-7 gift for kids who can pull off the entire 8-day challenge. My kid starts getting a hug after day 3.

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You sank my holiday experience!While it doesn't look much like the genre-defining 'This game isn't as much fun as a commercial made it look' toy of our youth, Electronic Battleship is now more exciting looking while boastin' the same old lows in game-play disappointment! Eeeeelectronic Battleship is no more fun than regular old Battleship, which is also a pretty god damn boring game. This is an excellent gift for someone you do not like, but want to appear you gave a cool gift at opening time.

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Prison Life RobloxKnow a kid that just can't behave? Maybe a co-worker? Make sure they understand a life of crime will come to no good.

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Mysterious and Indistinct ShirtFabulous yet classy, the Mysterious and Indistinct Shirt is a premium youth tee and "wears rough and tough for kids who play the same way."

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MastermindInvented in 1970 by an Israeli telecom expert, Mastermind is still the terrific game of strategy, logic, and deduction that you might remember from childhood. True, the packaging lacks the Bond-inspired photo of the dignified man and woman that appeared on the original box, but the game is just as elegant and addictive.

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Largemouth bass sandalsYou will look amazing in sandals that look like gasping largemouth bass, seriously (max size is a Men's 10, so only the dainty of feed need apply, e.g., not me). [Read More]

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Blank Playing CardsMake your own games! Or just stare at them. Whatever.

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Naughty + Nice

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Wink Plus ($79)In William Burroughs' novel Naked Lunch, Steely Dan III from Yokohama was the name of a stainless steel sex toy. The USB-chargeable Wink Plus vibrator from Crave is probably not what Old Bill Lee had in mind, because it is quite small, but it is made from stainless steel, and packs quite a vibrational wallop, with five intensity levels and two patterns.

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Wolf Crotch UnderwearWith a "convex design, large space and breathable," the 3D Wolf Head Crotch Underwear "make man looks sexy and wild" and can be yours for as little as five American dollars.

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Spend your holiday season TwistedThe Twisty Glass Blunt is a brain-hammer. Fill the glass chamber with your favorite herb, screw in the brass mouthpiece, and you are prepared to smoke a lot of weed. Perfect for a day at the beach, or an outdoor music festival, the Twisty Glass Blunt is an absolute favorite. I've got the mini as well.

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JASON

Poop emoji Santa HatWar on Christmas? Christmas seems to be integrating into todays meme-filled emoticon world. Now your Santa can proudly display his favorite emoji, or perhaps this is mean to signify something else.

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